For those who use social media extensively, particularly twitter, then time is of vital importance. This is especially true if you run an online business or are self employed and use twitter to network or promote your services. Below are five twitter tools which can save your time in managing your large number of followers and content.
When you are following a large number of people, including news channels and magazines, then there will be a huge amount of articles being posted. It is often the case that, however much you want to, there simply isn’t enough time to read them all whilst you’re at work or traveling home. One of the Twitter tools that offers a solution to this dilemma is pocket, formerly known as Read it Later. When installed, it allows you to save an article to a separate area so that you can read it later, either through your web browser or on a mobile device. Unlike other similar products, the list is produced in color, with associated photos attached. The tool works very well with images, and also allows you the option of selecting a readability view, which condenses the article for your iPhone or iPad; this is in conjunction with the normal full view which can be opened in a web browser. This is a great time saving tool which also allows you to organize the various links you have stored by tagging them.
Recommended Reading : Twitter Marketing for Start up Business
Tweriod
Many people use Twitter to network, and to communicate and share links with colleagues. For those of you with little time on their hands, you must ensure that each post you make has an impact. It would be ideal then, to know when the majority of your vast followers are online and available to read the important tweet you just sent, which can be particularly important if you have followers in many different time zones. This information is exactly what the twitter tool Tweriod provides. It analyses all the tweets sent from your contacts, and from this determines when the best time is for you to post your message for maximum effectiveness. Once analyses, the tool gives you the data in an easy to read format, either in written format or in graphs, so you can decide when the best time is to post; the service is free for analysis of up to 5000 followers, and if you want any more than that then you will have to pay extra.
Feedly
This twitter tool saves time by doing most of your browsing for you. There are no doubt multiple blogs and sites that you visit on a regular basis, and which you access through their twitter feeds. What this tool does is to go through your favorite sites, and pull all their content into one place. The personal site that it creates is very flexible, and you can customize it in a number of ways. As well as setting what sites it follows, you can also change the layout and partition it into different sections. For instance you can have a magazine section and a blog section. There is also a feature that recommends new sites too you, based on what you are currently following. Although the basic tool is free, a paid version was recently released, which allows users to search, use secure connections, and allow uses to save articles to applications such as Ever-note with a click of the mouse.
Recommended Reading : Social Media Marketing with Facebook
Buffer
Buffer is a great tool for managing not just twitter, but all of your social networking updates. It is a plug in that can be added to your browser and accessed either at home or on the go. It works by letting you post your update to the browser, and then allowing you to set a schedule for when you want the update to go out. This will save you a great deal of time during the day, when you don’t have to stop what you are doing every hour to log into your twitter account and post an update. The buffer tool will also analyse your tweets, informing you of which tweets are popular, who is reading them and at what time of the day.
Bit.ly
With so many tweets to read, and with so few characters per tweet, the last thing that you want to do is trawl through long URLs whenever somebody posts a link. Thankfully there are tools available for twitter which makes the process of posting links far easier. Bit.ly is one of these, which shortens the URL into a form that is compatible with the restrictions of Twitter. There are several of these services out there but Bit.ly is the official tool of twitter, and offers several advantages over its competitors. Multiple links can be stored as bookmarks, and can then be shared with your friends and followers. Rather than shortening the links by hand, bit.ly can do it for you automatically, and the service also provides data on whether or not the links have been clicked, which can be very beneficial if you are using twitter for promotional reasons.