Top Twitter Tools

by Pierre Zarokian

Twitter

The popularity of Twitter has exploded in the past year. More people than ever are using it as a way to share information and connect with others around the world. Recent news events have highlighted just how powerful Twitter has become as a way for diverse groups of people to discuss news and events that are important to them.

The recent surge in Twitter’s popularity highlights just how effective it can be as a business communications tool. Smart companies are leveraging the power of Twitter to spread their brands to increase customer loyalty and reach new customers. But creating and managing a Twitter account is not easy.

In order to be successful, you need to continually make new posts and interact with your Twitter fans.

So how can you do this while not letting your social media efforts overwhelm your marketing activities? The good news is that there are plenty of Twitter tools and automation services available which can help you manage your social networking campaigns.

In this article I will cover a list of top Twitter tools. However, before you start reading, I want to warn you that using some of these
automated tools to add massive numbers of followers in a short period of time may be against Twitter spam policies and may get your account shut down.

Although most of the tools have their own limits, I recommend using them conservatively. Some of the tools will also provide you a review/approval list before you actually add/remove any followers. This is a safer way, as it is more natural, so I do recommend that you try to use the tools that have this feature.

Here’s a look at some of the best in key categories:

Follower Management Tools

Social Oomph:

Formerly TweetLater, this service should be part of any
Twitter user’s tool kit. The free version of Social Oomph lets you perform tasks including:

  • Create and schedule tweets
  • Track Twitter keywords
  • Use bit.ly to shorten links
  • Automatically follow people who follow you
  • Unfollow people who unfollow you
  • Autorespond a  Direct Message to new followers

In addition, a paid version of Social Oomph is available for
$29.97 per month. This provides additional features like keyword following, RSS feeds, Facebook
connections and advanced keyword tracking.

Tweet Spinner:

The free version performs multiple functions:

  • Tweet creation and scheduling
  • Profile and design rotation
  • Management and archiving of Direct Messages and spam
  • Follower management, including keyword following and automatic unfollowing

For $20 a month, a paid version adds features such as location filtering and the ability to automatically follow your followers or
friends of your followers.

MarketMeSuite

MarketMeSuite is a mega suite with many features, including:

  • Desktop Management: Manage your complete Twitter account(s) from here
  • Keyword following and get following
  • Bit.ly URL shortening
  • Post to multiple accounts at once
  • Schedule Tweets
  • Update Facebook and many other networks using Ping.fm account

MarketMeSuite makes it public knowledge that they operate
“100% Twitter compliant.”  MarketMeSuite does not offer a free version, but their basic plan starts at $5.99/month, which is almost free. However, I contacted the company and asked if they would be willing to offer any discounts specifically to the readers of this article and they agreed to provide a one year membership for $29.99 at the following URL: http://www.marketmesuite.com/2011special.

Tweet Adder

  • Follows up to 400 users a day for a one-time lifetime fee of $55
  • Keyword following and geo following
  • Unfollow those that don’t follow you back
  • Tweet from RSS Feeds
  • Autorespond a  Direct Message to new followers

Tweep Follow

  • Follow 2000 users for $19 a month

RSS Feeds

You can use RSS feeds to populate your Twitter feed with news stories from various sources that are relevant to your audience. The RSS feeds can also include posts from your personal or business blogs.

Free RSS Feed Tools:

  • TwitterFeed.com
  • TwitterLive.net

Paid RSS Feed Tools:

  • Social Oomph Professional
  • Tweet Adder

Background Creators

Adding unique backgrounds makes your Twitter feed stand out from the generic users. You can also rotate backgrounds to keep things fresh. Several sites will help you with this process.

  • Twitbacks.com: Free service, but you need to pay $5 to remove their logo
  • Twitrbackgrounds: Professional service for $89
  • Mytweetspace: Professional service for $89
  • Twitter-Images.com: Professional service for $79

Desktop Management

Desktop Twitter publishing tools often give you more control over your postings than if you use the Twitter.com page. Here are the top ones:

  • TweetDeck: Allows you to post and perform Tweet scheduling. Available for the iPhone, iPad, Android and Chrome.
  • HootSuite: Performs keyword monitoring along with Tweet scheduling. Available for the iPhone, iPad, Android and Chrome.
  • MarketMeSuite: See details under Follower Management Tools.
  • Trillian: This IM software also has Twitter interface.

Monitoring and Alerts

You can use a variety of tools to monitor for your brand, company name, personal name or any keyword. Here are my recommendations:

  • Google Alerts (use the real-time setting to monitor Twitter)
  • Social Oomph
  • Tweet Alarm
  • Twilert
  • HootSuite
  • Radian 6 (fee-based)

URL Shorteners and Trackers

With only 140 characters available, space is everything on
Twitter. URL shorteners turn long URLs into just a few characters. There are
many URL shorteners out there, but I am only going to recommend you two, because
they offer clickthrough tracking.

  • bit.ly
  • goo.gl (by Google)

ABOUT PIERRE ZAROKIAN

Pierre Zarokian is the CEO/President of Submit Express, a leading search engine marketing company. Pierre Zarokian in an expert in SEO, Social Media and Reputation Management and has written numerous articles on these subjects and regularly speaks at industry trade shows such as events by Influence People and AffCon.

Launched in 1998, Submit Express has been ranked as the #1 SEO firm by Website Magazine and has been one of the fastest growing companies ranked by INC5000 three times (2007-2009) and by FAST 500 twice (2008-2009). Submit Express also provide content writing services from their sister website iClimber.

90+ Social Media Sites

I covered a listing of twenty dofollow social bookmarking sites in another post. This time around i am listed 90+ social bookmarking sites, both dofollow and nofollow. Some of the biggest sites online are nofollow but if you do get your submission to the front page of the site, it can mean a massive amount of traffic for a short period of time. The usefulness of both depends on your overall plan for your site.
social-media

Here is a list of Social Bookmarking sites, the pagerank follows the name of the site along with the number of indexed pages appearing in google when I compiled the list, please note that I did this using the SEO addon for firefox so there might be some errors in the number of indexed pages.

1. Slashdot – PR9 – 188,000 links
2. Digg – PR8 – 3,470,000 links
3. del.icio.us – PR8 – 1,540,000 links
4. Reddit – PR8 – 1,040,000 links
5. Technorati – PR8 – 760,000 links
6. Stumbleupon – PR8 – 725,000 links
7. Blinklist – PR7 – 1,620,000 links
8. Furl – PR7 – 1,210,000 links
9. Propeller – PR7 – 322,000 links
10. Rojo – PR7 – 6060 links
11. de.lirio.us – PR7 – 3770 links
12. Folkd – PR7 – 410 links
13. Netvouz – PR6 – 912,000
14. Mister-Wong – PR6 – 898,000 links
15. Simpy – PR6 – 867,000 links
16. Bibsonomy – PR6 – 469,000 links
17. Kinja – PR6 – 438,000 links
18. Backflip – PR6 – 227,000 links
19. Clipmarks – PR6 – 121,000 links
20. Rawsugar – PR6 – 50,300 links
21. Searchles – PR6 – 32,000 links
22. Searchallinone – PR6 – 18,800 links
23. Tailrank – PR6 – 10,900 links
24. Linkagogo – PR6 – 6790 links
25. Web2List – PR6 – 4780 links
26. Spurl – PR6 – 38 links
27. Faves – PR5 – 1,280,000 links
28. Megite – PR5 – 753,000 links
29. Clipclip – PR5 – 323,000 links
30. StartAid – PR5 – 637,000
31. Linkroll – PR5 – 147,000 links
32. Sk*rt – PR5 – 104,000 links
33. Listible – PR5 – 60,400 links
34. Feedmarker – PR5 – 58,800 links
35. Markaboo – PR5 – 48,400 links
36. Bringr – PR5 – 16,500 links
37. Gabbr – PR5 – 5000 links
38. Mybookmarks – PR5 – 916 links
39. Buddymarks – PR5 – 907 links
40. Tallstreet – PR5 – 408 links
41. Mylinkvault – PR5 – 71 links
42. Ma.gnolia – PR4 – 818,000 links
43. Web2Announcer – PR4 – 305,000 links
44. Diigo – PR4 – 276,000 links
45. Plugim – PR4 – 120,000 links
46. Lifelogger – PR4 – 86,700 links
47. Dropjack – PR4 – 65,000 links
48. Indiasphere.Net – PR4 – 45,900 links
49. Otavo – PR4 – 35,000 links
50. Butterflyproject.nl – PR4 – 34,500 links
51. Lookmarks – PR4 – 32,700 links
52. Myvmarks – PR4 – 28,200 links
53. Blurpalicious – PR4 – 25,300 links
54. Cloudytags – PR4 – 24,100 links
55. Mysitevote – PR4 – 20,000 links
56. A1-Webmarks – PR4 – 15,200 links
57. Philoi – PR4 – 12,400 links
58. Oyax – PR4 – 12,000 links
59. Gravee – PR4 – 9940 links
60. Votelists – PR4 – 6150 links
61. Gd-Sites – PR4 – 5840 links
62. Contentpop – PR4 – 5490 links
63. Gaddiposh – PR4 – 3130 links
64. Urlex.Info – PR4 – 654 links
65. Connectedy – PR4 – 636 links
66. Connectedy – PR4 – 568 links
67. Unalog – PR4 – 162 links
68. Bookmarktracker – PR5 – 314 links
69. Marktd – PR3 – 130,000 links
70. Getboo – PR3 – 96,500 links
71. Listerlister – PR3 – 19,100 links
72. Bookmarkplace – PR3 – 15,100 links
73. Jigg.In – PR3 – 9220 links
74. Stirrdup – PR3 – 9220 links
75. Chaamp – PR3 – 7770 links
76. Ez4U – PR3 – 6520 links
77. Socialogs – PR3 – 5200 links
78. Business-Planet – PR3 – 4740 links
79. Articlesnetwork – PR3 – 3670 links
80. Wirefan – PR3 – 3030 links
81. Fritterware – PR3 – 2970 links
82. Sitesays – PR3 – 1560 links
83. Bookmark4You – PR3 – 948 links
84. Crowdfound – PR3 – 782 links
85. Authorcontent – PR3 – 513 links
86. Info4It – PR2 – 91,100 links
87. Palbe – PR2 – 9300 links
88. Dealoid – PR2 – 9270 links
89. Barksbookmarks – PR2 – 7370 links
90. Articlesarchieve – PR2 – 5350 links
91. Article-Publishers – PR2 – 4380 links
92. Latestramblings – PR2 – 3180 links
93. Xlmark – PR2 – 2120 links
94. Ebizgo.Info – PR2 – 1150 links
95. Actualtopics – PR2 – 749 links
96. Projecthear – PR1 – 19,600 links
97. Wordsjournal – PR1 – 14,100 links

You may also be interested in a service that will do social bookmarking services for you. If so take a look at iclimber.com.

Free Tools to Speed Up Social Media Submission

Do you own a website or a blog and as a result spend a lot of time submitting your site to all the social media sites? What if you could cut down the time it takes to submit your pages to half an hour from the current two hours it takes? In this post I will be looking at two free tools which can drastically speed up the time it takes.
social media

First up on the list is Socialmarker found over at socialmarker.com. I initially came across this site during my first attempt at the thirty day challenge, when one of the members created it to make his submission process easier.

Socialmarker has an interesting way of going about the submission process. First of all you enter all the main details of your submission, page title, url, keywords and other details. Then you can select from a range of social media sites, either via select all or individually. There is also the option of selecting only dofollow sites. Once you have completed your selection, you can start posting.

The way this works is that using javascript, socialmarker opens all your selected pages at the same time in the background in the same tab and at the top of every site you are submitting to is a small horizontal frame which lets you go forward and backward between the sites you selected. Once you have completed one submission you can simple click next and finish another one. If you have already logged into all the sites, this process can be very very fast.

The other service is called Socialposter, available at socialposter.com. The selection process is much the same as socialmarker except that there is a link next to every social media site which submits your information. This might not be as fast as social marker but has the added benefit of not opening fifty or so pages at once in the background. If you are on a slower internet connection then this might be better suited for your needs.

In the end this is the most important difference between the two as they support most of the same sites and the initial process is quite similar. Try both out and see which one feels better for you.

If you are short in time to do your own social media marketing, we also recommend hiring a professional company to do it for you.  iClimber, is a social media marketing company, that offers social media profile creations and social media bookmarking service.

20 Do Follow Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites were all the rage recently, with every single article, blog post and web page out there being bookmarked. Users bookmark sites to contribute to the social fabric of the internet and to keep a proper list of sites and pages that they have visited and liked, while webmasters have been bookmarking their own pages for traffic and for the inherent value that comes from the link to the page from the social bookmarking site.
social bookmarking sites

For those of you are new to the world of search engine optimization, dofollow links are those which carry google’s pagerank and authority from one site to another. It is also well known that google gives a much higher weighting to links coming from social media sites and so a dofollow link from a social site carries a lot of benefits.

Once the top social bookmarking sites realized that webmasters were gaming their sites for better rankings on google, most converted their links to nofollow, removing and pagerank and link authority benefits from those links. Fortunately there are still many social bookmarking sites out there that have dofollow and have every intention remaining so. Here are the best twenty that I have found so far and I will add more as and when I find them.

This list is in order of pagerank, which you will within the brackets after the name of the site.
1. Folkd [V] (7)
2. Oneview (German) (7)
3. Spurl (6)
4. Feedmarker (6)
5. LinkaGoGo (5)
6. SpotBack (5)
7. Connectedy (5)
8. Blinklist [V] (5)
9. MyLinkVault (4)
10. A1 Webmarks (4)
11. OYAX (4)
12. Pixelmo [V] (4)
13. TeDigo (2)
14. MyPIP (3)
15. SyncOne (3)
16. Yattle (3)
17. Memfrag (3)
18. Ziki [V] (1)
19. i89 (0)
20. Chipmark (0)

We also recommend hiring a company like iClimber, that offers social bookmarking services. This way you can spend your time running your business and have a professional do what they are best at.