Top Twitter apps for your business

If your business has a Twitter account, chances are you’ve tried at least one of the third-party apps out there to help manage your account. There are many out there, all promising something that will improve your Twitter usage – from scheduling tweets to finding people to follow. 

We’ve listed some of the ones we use and rate from a business perspective.

If you want to find people to follow

Founded in 2010, the CEO of Twtrland built it to help people decide whether to follow someone or not. It:

• gives you data on your activity, amplification and followers, based on the past seven days
• highlights your recent followers, replies and top content
• allows you to see at a glance your best times to tweet for each day in real time
• helps you to find influencers by skill, location and their level of influence.

It’s the last point is what we really like it for. It’s simple to use and you’re not limited to using it a certain number of times a month.  If you’re trying to grow your following or look for prospective customers, this is a great tool.

There is, of course, a professional version, which allows you to track your competitors and get advanced analytics amongst other things.  We haven’t tried it yet, but if it’s as good as the free functionality, it’s probably quite a powerful beast.

Managing your followers

If you’re actively trying to grow your followers, you may also want an easy way to manage who you’re following. Manageflitter was recommended to us and having tried it, we can see why.  It has an easy-to-use interface allows you to sort your followers and unfollow them based on

• If they’re not following you back
• If they’ve been inactive in the last 30 days
• They are possibly fake (spam accounts)
• How influential or talkative they are

The free option allows you to unfollow up to 100 accounts each day. If you use the pro version, you can unfollow more, as well as create a list of accounts that you never want to unfollow or follow. However, we find the free version works for what we need.

Finding the best times to tweet

Tweriod is a tool that “helps you make the most of Twitter by letting you know the best time to tweet”. It analyses your followers (your last 1,000 followers on the free version) and from that, displays graphs of when you are likely to get the most exposure an when most of you followers are online. This is split into weekends, weekdays, Sundays and Mondays.

Managing all your networks

Hootsuite is an all-round social media management system. You can use it to monitor and post to all your social networks. One aspect we like is the ability to add more than one channel, for example we have a @BizspaceUK account and our newer @BizWorkLounge account.  

You can schedule posts for different times on different days, or auto schedule them and let Hootsuite deem what time that day would be best for your tweet to go out.

You can monitor each network via streams and there are many options for this. You can monitor your mentions, your home feed, your lists or specific keywords, to mention just a few. There’s a lot of versatility here for you to tailor your streams what you want to see.

It also offers reporting, although the more advanced reports are only available if you choose to pay for a pro or Enterprise account.

Do you use any Twitter apps that you think should be on this list? 

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