Twitter and How I Use It
Ah, Twitter. The platform that put ‘drive by conversations' on the internet. Personally, I love it for learning new tools, finding new people to connect with, finding new blogs to read, keeping up with news on both regional and international news.
I've been using Twitter since 2008 and have watched it grow into a tool for connecting:
- people with information
- people with other people
- companies with customers
I've been the disgruntled customer that was acknowledged and taken care of within 45 minutes of tweeting my displeasure. I've participated in political campaigns by tweeting & retweeting information about candidates at the Congressional and Presidential levels. Many times I participate in TweetChats and have met fun, intelligent, interesting people and learned about new technology, products, services and businesses.
Today I use it to find information about companies, people, tools and general news. I connect with others and have private, quick conversations that often turn into a video conversation on Skype or Google+. Twitter has connected me with people I wouldn't have met or known about on any other platform, simply because of the type of platform that it is.
Twitter Management Tools
All this tweeting can be unwieldy and difficult to manage, if you're using only the Twitter profile site. Over the years I've used a variety of tools. The following two twitter management tools are pretty easy to use and are very handy to have if you want to use Twitter for personal and business reasons.
SocialBro
https://get.socialbro.com/c2MfV
SocialBro is a Twitter management tool that gives you analytics and information about individual posts, followers and more. It's free forever for up to 5,000 contacts, then the pricing is tiered appropriately for a single user or team of users. Some features include:
- Fine-tune your target audience. Target Twitter users that have a real interest in your business using powerful filter and search functions to deliver results.
- Customize, optimize, and personalize your engagement. Expose your content to the largest audience possible with custom Best Time To Tweet reports, monitor influencers, and track your interactions to the second.
- Unlock in-depth insight about your Twitter community. Analyze behavior, see demographics, learn out the performance of key Tweets, and benchmark yourself against your competitors and peers.
Tweetdeck
https://about.twitter.com/products/tweetdeck
One of the first twitter management tools, and my personal favorite! It's a very popular choice among internet marketers and Twitter fans alike. Tweetdeck allows you to track and organize the people you're following via an intuitive and customizable dashboard. You can see easily the activity of specific lists, follows and hashtags.
If you find yourself often searching for specific hashtags or users when you visit Twitter, then you can add these to Tweetdeck and then very quickly and easily see them as soon as you load up. This is particularly useful for those who use Twitter for research purposes and can potentially save you a lot of time.
If you're new to Twitter, I have no doubt you'll find one of these tools to be helpful.
Let me know what you think.
