3 Good Twitter Tools

I don't know about you but sometimes it is hard to manage everything in the Twitter universe (Twitterverse as some refer to it) that is why I'm happy to have discovered three tools that you can use to keep things in order.

Twitter Lists

If you're using Twitter, I'm sure that you've heard about Twitter lists already, if not you should definitely use them. Here is a good video that gives a high-level overview of Twitter Lists...


Twitter Lists In A Nutshell

Facebook has had a listing function that you can apply to your friends for a while, so it is great to see Twitter put this into production. This can come in real handy to group people by whatever keyword you might wish to assign to them. It is also a good way to be able to quickly see if anybody on that list has tweeted something that you might be looking for and it provides you with a quicker way of finding things from people that you follow.

Another great thing about lists is that you can see the "public" lists of other tweeters that you follow. This can give you a peak into why people are followed. If you're following someone you can see the lists that they've created, so if there are key words in their lists that you're interested in, you might want to follow the people on their list or the list itself. This is another great way to meet people with similar interests to yourself or to meet people knowledgeable about topics you wish to learn more about. Further more you can look at the lists containing various tweeters and see other possible connections and people that you might want to follow based on the key words of the lists that they're in. You can also create "private" lists, if you don't want the world to see tweeters on a special list of yours.

Lists are also another way for people to market themselves on Twitter. If you get a reputation as in expert on a certain topic than people will be interested to see who is in your list for that topic.

Listorious

Listorious is a site dedicated to Twitter lists. They have all kinds of interesting lists from Twitter that you can check out. If you're into sports you might want to find out what players are twitting from the NFL or the NBA. If there is a celebrity that you're a fan of and would like to follow, you're likely to find them in some list here. In the technology and worlds of social media there are various lists from Pete Cashmore and Robert Scoble to be found here. There are also lists about charities, nonprofits, and a whole host of everything under the sun. This site can help you add a little more fun and focus to your twitter experience. And of course you can follow Listorious on Twitter too.

Friend or Follow

Friend or Follow is really handy for getting an overview of who you're following on Twitter that isn't following you, as well as who is following you that you're not following, and those that you follow that also follow you. I've read all kinds of articles about people's strategy on who they will or won't follow, and because there are so many people on twitter you'll eventually want to come up with some kind of strategy for how you handle the who you follow topic. Personally, I don't wish to follow spammers and people that are overly obscene or offensive. I will sometimes follow people that have different and even opposite beliefs to my own because you never know when you might learn something and I know that I don't own the market on anything, so it is good to be open. There are various programs out there that will auto-follow people that are following you, theoretically cutting down on your administration in Twitter, but I don't do this because I've seen spammers, would be 'porn stars', and other people that I would just assume not follow. Because I don't always follow people right back, I find that there are a lot of people that will follow me and drop me before I've had a chance to see if I want to follow them or not. Then there are those that follow you, wait for you to follow them and then they drop you, so it can come in handy to see who is all three of your groups on twitter.

With Friend or Follow you can get a csv file of...

• People that you follow that don't follow you back
• People that follow you that you don't follow back
• People that follow you that follow you back

This can give you a snapshot that you can use to compare where you were when you took the snapshot to where you are at some other point in time. If you're someone trying to build a twitter following this could be very useful. With the files being in csv format, you can slice and dice like you would with any other Excel file and use them in all kinds of creative ways. If you're tweeting for business purposes and are using some kind of Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) there is probably some way that you can import/export the files for use in your software. Those of you marketers out there can probably see the potential if you think about it for a moment or so.

Well, I hope that you find all three of these tools useful. They can really help you to try to keep some kind of order in the chaos that is twitter.