Seven Twitter tools to make you tweet-tastic!

Are you struggling to make a success of Twitter for your small business? Sarah Kerrigan examines seven great tools that can help.

Twitter is a fantastic tool for businesses, yet so many brands struggle with using it successfully. This is partly due to lack of time and resources but may also be due to other reasons.

Ask yourself this question and (answer honestly) are you using Twitter as a marketing tool to listen and engage or are you just using Twitter to spasmodically tweet promotional content about your brand? There is a difference between the two and that difference involves a little thing called strategy.

Strategy is so important to keep in mind when you are using Twitter (and any other social media platform) for business as it's so easy to lose your way, and before you know it you've wasted 30 minutes looking at cute dog pictures outside poll stations from the trending hashtag that just caught your eye - #dogsatpollingstations...

...cute dogs though!

*cough* ANYWAY, luckily (for all of us!) there are some fantastic Twitter tools out there to help us with our Twitter strategy so that we can measure, engage, optimise and improve our tweets.
Below I have listed seven of my favourite Twitter tools

1. First up it's Twitter Analytics. You can find this tool in Twitter itself or head to analytics.twitter.com. Within Twitter Analytics you can discover all sorts of interesting revelations about your tweets such as how many people saw them, how many people engaged with them, who your top follower that month has been and much, much more! But remember don't get too bogged down with metrics that don't matter. Concentrate on the engagement rate of your tweets to learn from what worked well and what didn't.

2. Next is Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. I have grouped these together because they are both social media dashboards (places where you can manage Twitter from rather than using the Twitter platform itself). From both dashboards you can schedule tweets (which helps you keep a consistent presence on Twitter), while Hootsuite also has a few extra features which can be really useful for your overall social media activity (not just Twitter) so is a must for anyone managing multiple social media profiles. Some of my favourite Hootsuite features are: RSS feed integration, the suggested content tool and the Hootlet browser extension.

3. In third place is Followerwonk from Moz. I love this tool! It's all about finding new followers as well as analysing the ones you have already. One of my favourite features is the 'search bios' feature. It allows you to search for Twitter bios that include certain keywords to help you find relevant people to follow with certain interests or who are in certain industries. It also gives you useful metrics about these people like social authority and the number of followers they have.

4. Next it's Hashtagify.me. Hashtags are something that a lot of twirgins (Twitter Virgins) struggle with so this tool is great for finding different hashtags to use that are relevant to pretty much any subject. All you have to do is type in a given word and Hashtagify.me will tell you the all-time top 10 hashtags related to that topic.

5. Next up is BuzzSumo . Apart from having a very cool name, BuzzSumo shows you how many times pieces of content have been shared on Twitter and other social media platforms. You just need to type in your chosen topic to see the results. The tool is great for finding content to share on Twitter that you know has already been popular, therefore increasing the chance of it being shared and engaged with.

6. Coming in next is SocialBro . If you have already started building up your Twitter followers you can use SocialBro to check what time those followers are online so you can adjust the time you send out your tweets accordingly. SocialBro will then generate a report for you every week informing you of when the best time to tweet that week will be. It is useful for optimising your tweeting activity so your tweets reach as many people as possible.

7. Last but not least it's My Top Tweet . This is a fun tool that tells you what your top EVER tweet is. Ever, ever"¦!? Yes. Ever, ever. Why is this useful? From this you can look at the format and content of your top tweet and try and replicate something similar to see if it is a success again.

What are you favourite Twitter tools to use when tweeting? Share them with us in the comments below.

This post was written by Sarah Kerrigan, social media executive at MadeSimple