subject: Get the Most From Your Tweets - Using Third Party Applications to Enhance Your Twitter Experience [print this page] Get the Most From Your Tweets - Using Third Party Applications to Enhance Your Twitter Experience
If you haven't heard of Twitter by now, either you're living under a rock or you just don't spend anytime on the internet. Twitter is one of the largest internet social networks today. If you're connected to social networking on the internet, maybe you've already signed up for a Twitter account. You posted a couple of Tweets, followed a few people and even had a couple of people follow you back. Now what?
There's more to Twitter than answering the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less. What many people don't realize is that there are many programs on the internet designed to integrally work with Twitter to make better use of your time and resources. Following are just a few applications available. Feel free to spend some time searching for others that help streamline your Twitter tasks.
Probably the one program that I find most helpful is Tweetlater.com. It's free to sign up, although you can upgrade to a paid version. Tweetlater allows you to set up direct messages to people when they start following you. You can even set up several versions of responses that will rotate so that not every follower gets exactly the same message. Although this may seem impersonal, it's very handy when you can't keep up with your followers. Sending a robotic "thank you" is better than not responding at all! You can also set up drafts so you can reuse messages rather than retyping them all of the time. You can set up your account to automatically follow or unfollow people who do the same to you. For more options, visit Tweetlater and get your free account.
Another application that works really well is Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed allows you to feed your blog posts so that they automatically show up in 4 different social sites including Twitter and Ping.fm. Within Ping.fm you can also post to additional sites such as Facebook. This saves you from having to repost your articles and blogs to multiple sites individually, a real time saver!
Other programs such as Twollo and Tweetergetter help you generate followers automatically based on criteria that you choose. Revtwt.com and Tweetmyblog.com are different methods used to generate revenue from your Twitter account.
There are even more Twitter applications out there. Just use caution when submitting your Twitter user name and password. You don't want anyone hijacking your Twitter account! Also, don't forget to add a live comment on Twitter now and then. The whole point is to be social which means keeping it personal.
