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Five New Twitter Tools You Should Know

Lee Odden
Lee Odden
Blogging Strategy, Microblogging, Online Marketing, Social Media

Right along with Facebook, YouTube and blogging, Twitter is one of the most often written about social media communication tools. (Follow me @leeodden) We’ve run polls about how people use Twitter as well as aggregated tips from the Twitter community on how to get the most productivity out of it. This post shares a few new Twitter tools you may find useful.

TweetWheel – You may have a 100 or even 1000 followers. Which of your followers know each other? Tweet Wheel helps you find out visually. Note, if you have a LOT of followers, this will take a while.

Lee Odden Twitter Wheel

The account I searched on has around 1,400 followers and it looks like Tweet Wheel limits the display to 100 or so. There’s only so much room on the screen.

Who Should i Follow? – Whether you’re new on Twitter or an early adopter, there are likely people you should be following, but aren’t. Which begs the question, “Who should I follow?”. That’s where the tool, whoshouldifollow.com comes in. 🙂 It looks at who’s following you that you’re not following back and has sliders for filtering by popularity and physical location.

Twitter Tool Who Should I Follow

One thing you could do here is find out really popular Twitterers that your competition is NOT following and follow them. This may provide an opportunity to connect with their sphere of influence while they’re not looking. 🙂

Twerpscan – Now that you’ve beefed up your list of people to follow, who shouldn’t be following you? If there are opportunistic marketers following everyone under the sun in the hopes those good souls will just automatically follow them back, this tool might help identify those whom you may want to block.

Twitter Tool Twerpscan

The thing about this tool is that you have to login, so you may want to change your password to something temporary before running the tool and then change it back when you’re done. Twerpscan checks the number of followers of everyone on your contact list, the number of people they are following, and the ratio between them offering each follower’s name, bio, last tweet, a reputation thumbs up or down, followers, following and a link to block the follower if the ratio is over the threshold you set.

Summize – While other tools for searching Twitter have been around a while, they’re often not stable or consistent. Summize is FAST and shows trending topics plus different language searches.

Twitter Tool Summize

There are also some nifty search operators like the one that helps you look for Tweets where people say “cool” but only Tweets that include links. Of course, there is an RSS feed for any search results page as well.

Twitt(url)y – Where do we find out about many of these tools and news before the rest of the Twittersphere? Friendfeed is first but after that, Twitt(url)y does a nice job of providing a Techmeme style representation of up and coming URLs that are mentioned in individual Tweets.

Twitter Tool Twitt(url)y

You can filter out Tweets by language and what’s neat is that the links are kept accurate whether Tweets use a URL shortening service or not by actually visiting each link. Twitt(url)y is a useful site as an early warning on news and trends.

That’s our five tools and here’s a bonus time waster if you haven’t seen it already.

Feeling like a Tweeping Tom? Then check out Twistori:

Twitter Tool Twistori

It’s probably good you can’t see the identity of who is writing because, well, that’s sort of obvious.

The challenge and opportunity with social tools like Twitter is that it can be very easy to fall into wasting a lot of time. But if you can find the right mix of 3rd party tools, Twitter can be a very productive and social tool.

Find some of the top Twitterati at Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop page for Twitter.

About Lee Odden

@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of TopRank's B2B Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he's the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on B2B marketing topics including content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he's likely running, traveling or cooking up something new.

Comments

  1. Faris says

    May 5, 2008 at 6:21 pm

    Nice screen shot of Twerpscan… I believe that’s Calcanis at the top of the list of people you shouldn’t follow back.

  2. TranceMist says

    May 5, 2008 at 8:03 pm

    When I was reading these, I thought “oh cool” and then caught myself thinking these were for Friendfeed instead of twitter.

    Twitter so limited, when put in scope of Friendfeed. Sure, these are cool, but such a small part of the big picture.

  3. Igor Poltavskiy says

    May 5, 2008 at 8:15 pm

    We also should know Twitter conversation tool quotably.com

  4. Lee Odden says

    May 5, 2008 at 8:32 pm

    Igor, quotably.com is down for maintenance tonight. Will check it again in the am.

  5. Lee Odden says

    May 5, 2008 at 8:34 pm

    Faris, the Twerpscan shows good and questionable Twitter accounts inter-mixed – unless you sort them. Jason Calcanis comes up as very authoritative.

    TranceMist, I don’t mention Friendfeed until much later in the post – not sure where that impression would come from. However, you’re right in that it would be great to see some 3rd party apps for Friendfeed.

  6. Connie Bensen says

    May 5, 2008 at 9:24 pm

    Thanks for these. I agree that quotably.com is worthwhile. I used it when Twitter was not working the other night (to post from).

  7. Brian Solis says

    May 5, 2008 at 10:29 pm

    Lee, thanks for keeping on top of this stuff and helping point people in the right direction!

  8. giovanni gallucci says

    May 5, 2008 at 11:08 pm

    Lee,

    GREAT list! There are some HUGE time savers here. Thanks.

  9. Igor Poltavskiy says

    May 6, 2008 at 12:49 am

    My Tweetwheel(http://www.tweetwheel.com/scabr) is down on friend #26. 🙁

  10. Kiki says

    May 6, 2008 at 3:52 am

    Great list, thanks for sharing! I’d maybe add Tweetburner to it (www.tweetburner.com), a nice tool that helps tracking what’s happening with the links you twitter.

  11. Neville Hobson says

    May 6, 2008 at 4:43 am

    Excellent list, thanks.

    One more tool I’d include – Twitter Karma, which lets you see in one place who follows you and who you follow. Great for quickly discovering your network of complete (or incomplete!) connections. A great time saver.

    http://www.dossy.org/twitter/karma/

  12. Twitplus says

    May 6, 2008 at 4:55 am

    You may also want to check out twitplus.com

    Lets your send files, pictures & video to your twitter followers either privately or publically.

  13. James Mann says

    May 6, 2008 at 6:08 am

    Excellent post. I love learning about new ways to use or view twitter friends.

    TweetWheel is pretty cool and Summarize is as well.

    Thanks

  14. Marjolein Hoekstra says

    May 6, 2008 at 6:22 am

    As of today, TwerpScan also offers the possibility to give your thumbs up or down about someone right from the web interface. See this screenshot for what that looks like: http://snipr.com/reputationscreenshot

    To enable this option on your own system, install @Carlo Zottmann’s Greasemonkey script, of which you’ll find details here: http://snipr.com/twt_reputationscript

    I cover new Twitter stuff at @twtooltrack.

  15. BarbaraKB says

    May 6, 2008 at 8:11 am

    Excellent summary of some of the latest new tools.

    Twitter is THE human feed: RTS (Real Twitter Syndication).

  16. Barbara Ling says

    May 6, 2008 at 10:30 am

    Just headed over to check out Tweetwheel and it’s down for me. 🙁

    And don’t forget about http://www.TwitterBudgie.com ! 🙂

    Enjoy,

    Barbara

  17. Aaron Peters says

    May 6, 2008 at 9:51 am

    Hi Lee,

    nice post. TweetWheel is great!

    Just wrote a blog post yesterday: Top 10 Twitter Apps
    http://bembamedia.com/2008/05/05/top-10-twitter-apps/

    What do you think of my list?

    Txs
    Aaron

  18. David Hobson says

    May 6, 2008 at 9:54 am

    Really useful post. I`ve heard of a couple of the tools but not all of them.

  19. robert john ed says

    May 6, 2008 at 9:57 am

    Lee-

    I don’t use Twitter. Maybe if I did I’d have another way to contact you…was wondering if you wanted to grab a bite to eat down at the BBQ joint sometime this week or next?

    I went by it yesterday @ 1pm and it wasn’t open…they’re still running right? Shoot me an email and let’s set something up.

  20. Kiowa Jackson says

    May 6, 2008 at 10:16 am

    I’ve just started using twitter. After that guy busted out of jail with it I figure it could be a good thing to have. *saving this list for later*

  21. Aaron says

    May 6, 2008 at 11:17 am

    Um, apparently you’re supposed to be following me…and Rand but he doesn’t follow back. High and mighty twitter hater he is 😉

  22. Our Monmouth says

    May 6, 2008 at 12:22 pm

    Thanks for a intresting list.
    I like twitterlocal to network with local bloggers:

    http://www.twitterlocal.net

    @imnj

  23. David Petherick says

    May 6, 2008 at 3:10 pm

    Five really nice resources, Lee, succintly described. Thanks for the pointer.

  24. IheartSF says

    May 6, 2008 at 7:29 pm

    Nice list. I’d add to it the Siphs integration with Twitter. When I use Siphs to bookmark sites, the link automatically posted to my Twitter feed.

  25. Jim says

    May 7, 2008 at 5:05 am

    I love the wheel. Very cool. Thanks
    Jim

  26. Jeff Majka says

    May 7, 2008 at 7:32 am

    Great post Lee! Love the Wheel! Jeff

  27. Kevin says

    May 7, 2008 at 12:21 pm

    I would have to say I really like twitterfeed (http://twitterfeed.com/), for feeding my blog to twitter. They support OpenID which is a plus, are reliable, and pretty easy to use.

  28. Sjors says

    May 7, 2008 at 3:10 pm

    another nice site is Twittersoap, which allows you to stream your mobile photos by toppic

    http://www.twittersoap.com

  29. Carter says

    May 8, 2008 at 2:42 pm

    Thank you!

    I’m relatively new to Twitter and these tools just made the experience MUCH more valuable and shaved months off my learning curve!

  30. James from Babyspot.com says

    May 8, 2008 at 10:10 pm

    Great Post!!!

    I am @jamesatbabyspot

    See you in twitter!

  31. lmc says

    May 10, 2008 at 2:58 pm

    great list, thanks. and thanks to http://twitter.com/waynesutton for the tweet.

  32. Michael Jensen says

    May 13, 2008 at 1:02 pm

    Lee, I’ve shared these twitter tools with you through Twitter, but thought I’d add them to your comments of this post…

    Twitter Answers with TweetAnswers – Ask questions and get answers! Simple to use: “@tweetanswers #topic Your question”

    LiveTwitting for conference and event coverage through twittering. Records all your coverage, includes speaker and topic organization through simple commands.

  33. SolarDave says

    May 13, 2008 at 11:24 pm

    Good write up. I created a twitter account a long time ago and now it seems like the people worth following are starting to use it so now I am using it every day.

  34. Stu says

    May 13, 2008 at 11:37 pm

    Cool list…thanks! This might make twitter a little more interesting to use.

    Cheers,
    Stuart

  35. Ela says

    May 14, 2008 at 7:41 am

    Thanks for the list. I came across the tool TwitterLocal.net. It allows to filter out Tweets by location. We can generate an RSS feed to pull up Tweets from a certain area, specified by city, state, postal code, and a mile radius.

  36. Ela says

    May 14, 2008 at 7:44 am

    Re: TwitterLocal.net tool. I have just tried to access the website and it is temporarily unavailable but check this out later on. This is a really cool and neat Twitter app.
    thanks

  37. Roger says

    May 15, 2008 at 7:16 am

    Great post, thanks. It’s good to have objective ways to decide who to follow. As I point out in my blog TwitterThoughts, choosing who to follow and block is crucial to a meaningful Twitter experience. However, it’s not just a numbers game. As one of your commenters points out, Jason Calcanis looms large in the Twitterverse, but most of what he puts out is self-promotional. As opposed to answering the question “What are you doing?” the most important step to a worthwhile Twittexperience is to ask “What do I want to know?” Start there and you won’t go far wrong.

  38. Biff says

    May 21, 2008 at 2:19 am

    Wow, what a waste of time! Do any twits ever get any work done?

  39. Lee Odden says

    May 21, 2008 at 6:12 am

    Here are two excellent posts citing specific, productive uses of Twitter:

    Tweeting for companies

    101 practical uses of Twitter

  40. alex says

    May 31, 2008 at 12:35 am

    l love the wheel. Very cool. Thanks

  41. Ruth Ann Macklin says

    June 18, 2008 at 10:56 pm

    Ahhh…so many fun things and so little time!!

  42. Sarah says

    July 5, 2008 at 7:20 am

    Very good and relevant topic! I really want to post this to my blog, what are your rules on that?

  43. jilan says

    August 22, 2008 at 3:12 am

    Great article , but i think tweetwheel takes too long.
    I kind get board in the middle & close the window.

  44. David says

    August 25, 2008 at 12:46 am

    Hey! you left out http://www.tweeterized.com

  45. paisley says

    August 25, 2008 at 9:30 am

    good article

  46. Jeff Przybylski says

    October 23, 2008 at 8:33 pm

    I’ve been using Twitter for a while now, but never really did much with it, but after seeing some of these tools I’m inspired to build up a following again!

  47. unsworth sugden pr says

    November 1, 2008 at 2:15 am

    Great post. I’m off to twitter. Thanks

  48. Rob says

    November 2, 2008 at 2:41 pm

    Great tools…I’m new on twitter, and everyday I found it more interesting!
    Thanks for this article.
    Im @lespaul777

  49. Lisa Williams says

    November 3, 2008 at 4:17 pm

    Interesting tools, I think the hardest part is deciding where you spend your time (just like with friends in real life;) Thanks Lee

  50. Allan says

    November 9, 2008 at 6:58 pm

    It’s interesting to see so many peripheral or ancillary services cropping up around Twitter. Twitter has not settled on a business model yet so I think these third party developers are taking a huge risk. On the other hand, Twitter has created so much passion around its service that this outgrowth of third party apps are a testament to its useful and sticky nature.

  51. Mike Kelly says

    December 22, 2008 at 1:01 pm

    Makes me want to start using twitter more often, I’m pretty picky about add on tools nice list there more then a few keepers here…

  52. twitty says

    December 27, 2008 at 1:37 pm

    Hey that’s cool collection of twitter tools. Here is one more addition http://twitbuttons.com. This tool generates code for follow me buttons and hosts button images. It is fast and easy and very usable

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