TweeMaid

TweeMaid is a paid service that cleans out people that you are following but that are not following you back. Or you can ask them to have them unfollow everyone. It does not matter if you have one follower or a million, it is a set price of $15.95.

You can add exceptions for people that you want to continue to follow despite the fact they are not following you.

It is a nice housekeeping tool to order from time if you don't have the time to go through your list yourself.

Twitter Ribbons

Twitter Ribbons brought to you by Twitter Know How is a cool little widget that allows you to create a ribbon for your website or blog.

To create one, simply:
- Go to their website
- Type in your Twitter name
- Select the color scheme and version you want
- If you tweet about Twitter Ribbons you get access to 60 more templates
- Click submit
- They will create code that you need to add into the HTML of your site
- You are done and you have a cool way to attract new followers!

Check out the one I added to Twitter Go To Gal!

Tweet Blocker

Spammed by oily salesman or porn? Tweet Blocker can help stop spammers by reporting them. This tool is a listing that keeps track of spammers on Twitter.

Similar to TwitChuck, TweetBlocker this tool, you can:

- Report spammers

- Check a username in their database to see a ranking

Geo Chirp

Geo Chirp is a new Twitter application that lets you search tweets based on geographic results. It is an essential tool when trying to find contacts in your area. You can search on any key word you like to hone into to people in your niche, people who share your passions or target customers.

Looking to sell a particular type of product into a certain sales region? Geo Chirp will help you find people having conversations about it.

Traveling to new city and looking for like-minded tweeters, search in the area you choose, by topic that you choose and plan a meet-up/tweet-up or whatever.

Twitchuck

Got a new follower that you don't know? Before you follow them back, check them out to see if they are a spammer. Simply go to Twit Chuck, plug in the user's name and you will get a recommendation back telling you whether you should follow that person or not. It takes two seconds and it can save you a lot of work down the line.

TwitDiff

TwitDiff is a tool that notifies you when one of several events occur. These are when you stop or start following someone (less useful) to when people start or stop following you. Since Twitter already sends you a notification when someone starts following you, I recommend trying it out for the instances when people stop following you.

A more reliable solution to Qwitter, which has had it's share of issues, TwitDiff sends you a notification that indicates all unfollows and is produced at an interval you set (12 hrs to 30 days)

Tweetizen

Tweetizen is a site that lets you create groups of people or groups by topic that you are interesting in paying close attention. You can customize the name and look and feel of your group to make it fun as well. They have a very easy how-to section.

To start you need to grant access to your Twitter account by filling in your user name and password and then you are all set to segment the people your are following, or the topics you are interested in to your heart's desire!

Tweepular

I love, love, love this dashboard tool! Tweepular is a simple and fantastic way of seeing followers, people you are following but not following you, and people following you which you are not following. It will also have a tab of recent unfollows. Other tools offer similar stats put not in such an easy to use format.

Visually it is nice too, the colors allow you to very quickly and easily see where you are at. The dashboard is just plain cool. When I first used it, I realized that I had 2 friends that I had somehow missed following! They were following me, but I wasn't following them. I was able to follow them on the same screen instantaneously!


Easy to use and pretty, go get it!

Tweetcloud

Not sure if you want to follow someone, but don't feel like scrolling through their tweet stream? As you add more and more people to follow (there will be more and more content in your Twitter stream), one of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don’t care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow.

Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person’s tweets so you can see what they tweet about.

Also you can use this tool on yourself to see what your areas of concentration are. If you start losing followers, it may be your topics!

FriendOrFollow - who is following you?

FriendOrFollow is a simple tool that gives you a list of the people you are following that are not following you back. You enter in your Twitter user name, wait for the list to generate and then see who isn't following you. You can sort by a number of parameters if you are looking for something in particular.

For the most part, you are probably following more people than are following, so don't get to worked up about it, but there may be some people that you decide to unfollow based on the fact that they are not following you.

Qwitter - alerts when people unfollow you

You shouldn't get to hung up on people leaving you, but if you feel like you are losing a lot of followers and you quite figure out why maybe Qwitter can help. Qwitter is a simple tool that emails you when someone stops following you. In the email message that they send, they let you know what was the tweet that the person left you on.

Just a note that this tool seems to erratic from time to time.

Localtweeps - finding people close by

Twitter is used all over the world, and it is a great way to extend your business's reach, but sometimes you may want to reach local customers. Localtweeps allows you to list your Twitter account in their database and attach a zip or postal code to it. You can look for users in a certain locale by zip, or browse by city, state (or province). Conversely, users looking for your particular service can enter a zip code and find you!

In addition, you can connect with other local businesses in your area for networking and partnership opportunities, etc. Right now the service is only supporting the U.S. and Canada , but they plan to expand service to include other countries in the future.

Get listed and get found!

DoesFollow?

As simple tool that does one thing: let's you know if the person you’re following is following you back.

Check it out at http://doesfollow.com/

Tweetlater - Essential Automation and Tracking Tool

If Tweetdeck is the quintessential Twitter tool, then TweetLater is like your Twittter production house. It is the ultimate in automation. This is a free tool (there is a professional version, but with the free version being so robust, it is unnecssary for me). There are a ton of things that you can do with this tool, it is very powerful with helping you:

• Scheduling Tweets that can be sent at a time when you are unavailable, even while you are sleeping or on vacation.
  
  > Sharing value-added content is an incredible way to raise credibilty with your followers who are also potential clients? Got a whole list of articles or books that you think are good resources? Spend an hour creating individual tweets about them and schedule them out for once per day (or as often as you like) for several days or weeks.
  
  > Got clients all the round the world? Make sure you stay top-of-mind by Tweeting when they are awake (while you may be asleep!)
  
  > Going on vacation and still want to stay top-of-mind by Tweeting while you are sipping that mai-tai? Prepare and schedule out your tweets while away and you followers may never know you were away!
  


• Set up Keyword Digests (reviews)
  
  > This is a great tool, much as I described for Google Alerts. If there are words, keywords, or topic conversations that you are interesting to "listening" in on you can set up a keyword digest and get them emailed to you as often as every 4 hours.
  
  > I sell a social media gadget called Poken. So I have set up a keyword alert for Poken so that I can understand the trends around what people are talking about it. It works really great, one word of caution though - make sure to select for English only, otherwise you will get may too many results!


• Get a digest of all of the @replies you have received
  
  > I think that Tweetdeck is more useful for following your @replies, but having it emailed to you is also a good prompt if you are not in Twitter as often as you would like.
  
  
• Manage unlimited Twitter accounts
  
  > If you have multiple Twitter accounts, this is nearly the only tool that allows you to view and manage all your accounts all in one location at no charge. A nice feature if you do have multiple accounts.
  
  
• Automatically “return-follow” your new followers or "return-unfollow" people who unfollow you
  
  >It is convenient, but I am not a big fan. I don't think you should automatically follow every person who follows you. There are a lot of "get rich quick" people out there who you just don't want to follow. Also, you have a follow strategy in place for your buiness which dictates that you only want to follow people within your particular niche. Whatever the case, I think that following and unfollowing should be done by you.
  
  
• Automated DM's
  
  >The one thing it does that I highly discourage my clients from doing is the creation of automatic messages when have new followers. This is the "thanks for following me, please buy my product" or "thanks for following me, I can help you make millions online!" These are awful and so spammy! If you really want to welcome new followers, do it individually with a customized message applicable to that user, or don't do it at all!

There you have it, TweetLater, a very powerful automation tool that can help you keep your tweeting strategy on track.

Twellow - Finding others in your niche

Looking to find people in your specific niche and industry? Twellow is great Twitter directory that can assist you with connecting to the right people for you. It is basically The Yellow Pages for Twitter. Twellow searches and analyzes millions of public tweets and associates them back to the owners, they then take the owner (user) and categorize them by topic.

You can browse their site by topic looking for whatever peaks your interest, or you can drill down further into a specific category and find a more refined search results. For example, if I just look under the Green category, you will see there are more than 17,000 people, but if I look for people talking about or associated with Pets (in the Green category), than comes back with 49. That is much more manageable. After that you can scan people by location, what they are saying etc.

Don’t forget to add your profile as well. To do that first make sure you are not already there by entering your Twitter username in the search box. If it is there,make sure to complete your profile. If it is not there, add it by following the step-by-step process outlined on the Twellow site.

A very easy tool to use, so get out there and let your twingers do the walking!

Tweetdeck - the Quintessential Twitter Tool

my Tweetdeck screen

To start this blog, I wanted to begin with what I think is the quintessential Twitter tool, Tweetdeck. If you use no other tool, use this one. If you are going to be stuck on a deserted island and can only bring one Twitter tool, choose Tweetdeck.

This tool gives you a wonderful dashboard that breaks down the components of Twitter. You can have up to 5 columns of information available to you at all times, I usually use 4 unless I am doing something specific with groups (more on that later).

You can have a screen for "All Friends" - that's everyone that you are following. It is a constant flow of what everyone (that you are following) is saying. So if you are following a lot of people, but that can be a lot! But unlike viewing this stream on the web, you don't have to keep refreshing the screen, it does it on its own (although you can force a refresh if it is not fast enough for you!).

Next, you can have your "Replies" column (@replies). This is when someone talks to you or uses your name in a Tweet in public. This allows you to keep track of who is talking about you or with you. Of course, you can also do this from the web, but...not all on one screen. Remember, these are public tweets.

Next is DM's. These are Direct Messages. A message from one Twitter username to another. These are not public. A lot of people "auto-DM" when they get new followers. This an automatic message that goes out, something like "thanks for following me, buy my product". [By the way, I discourage my clients to do these, if you can't tell.] So if you follow a lot of people with these, you may got a DM column that is full of "junk mail." These can be deleted. I just mention it because you may miss authentic DM's if you don't pay attention.

Last on my dashboard is Favorites. These are tweets that I have tagged as a favorite for one reason or the other. I don't think most people use this one, so I will tell you about what most people do use, and that is either Groups or Search.

You can customize a group of people you follow. You can have several groups. If there is a group of industry people you want to watch, you can call it "Twitterati" (or whatever), add the people you want and you will see just their tweets in the Groups column. You can create a group of girlfriends, celebrities, whatever. The group allows you to have a filtered list of a subset of the people you are following.

I sell a social media gadget called Poken. So sometimes I use Search to see if people out there are talking about it. With the Search column, I can enter the word or phrase I am interested and see the results of anyone mentioning this term, and not just people I am following. It's great for companies looking to see who is talking about them.

Before I leave you, I just want to mention a few things about the Tweetdeck header.


From here you can enter your next tweet, shorten a url, upload a photo, open or close columns, as well as decide if you want your tweet to appear as your Facebook status. (I like this control rather than having every tweet show up on Facebook, I think it annoys people, it certainly annoys me!)

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air-based application that runs on PC or Mac (it requires that you install the software first).

And that's pretty much it! It is a global view of everything that is going on in your little Twitter-world!