The essential Twitter toolkit

All the apps you need to successfully use and maintain your Twitter profile

Using Twitter is easy. Using Twitter successfully is much more difficult. You need a collection of tools to help you monitor, analyze, automate and share content. After reviewing Twitter apps and sites for the past seven months, we decided to put together one definitive toolkit that covers all your needs.

Desktop/mobile client

TweetDeck is our go to tool for Twitter monitoring and mobile access. It is an all-in-one tool that greatly simplifies using Twitter. Not only limited to Twitter, TweetDeck allows you to follow and update Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, as well as monitor keywords around your brand or industry. You can even view pictures and YouTube videos within TweetDeck and it auto-shortens urls. Best of all, you can access your account from multiple computers, which is great if you use separate computers at work and home.

Networking

When looking for new people to follow, We Follow is the best place to start. This straightforward site allows you to label your account with the keywords that best define your Twitter stream. Then you can search We Follow’s keyword database to find the most relevant and interesting people to follow. This is always the first place we start when helping a client identify key people of interest.

Media Sharing

Odds are you’re going to want to share photos from your smartphone, and there is no better way to do that than with Twitpic. Setup and use are a snap. It doesn’t even require you to create a new account – after logging in with your Twitter account you’re ready to start sharing pics from wherever you are.

Tweet Scheduler

You can’t tweet 24 hours a day (if you can, seek help), but you can schedule tweets to go out around the clock. The best way we found to do this is through Twaitter. Odds are, your Twitter audience isn’t just in your time zone, so it’s important to reach people when they are most likely to be online. Twaitter allows you to schedule tweets so when you’re asleep, you can still send your links out. They’ve recently added recurring tweets and the ability to add your RSS feed, so now your Twitter feed doesn’t have to miss a beat.

Analytics

After you’ve got a hoard of followers and have your stream going strong and steady, you need to be able to judge how effective your campaign is. Twitter analyzer does just that. This one site allows you to see how quickly your Twitter account is growing, how far your reach extends, who is following you and lots more.  

There are more tools you can use to enhance your account, but if you master these five, you’ll be a Twitter God before you know it. What's in your toolkit?

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.