Tweefind - search results by influence

Tweefind works differently than Twitter Search in that the results are sorted by tweets of people who have more followers, meaning more influence. So if you search on Ding Dongs and Ashton Kutchner or Guy Kawalski have tweeted about it, their tweets are going to be at the top of the search results list, with the people with fewer people in descending order after that.

This can be useful if you are a company with a product and you are looking to see who is talking about you and what kind of influence they have.

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!

Follow Friday - what's it all about?

Follow Friday is a way of recommending people you follow to other people in your sphere of influence. Recommendations take away the pain and gives everyone the chance to give their friends a chance to interact with more people.

Instead of just tweeting a list of people to follow, give a short description of why you think they are of intersts to others, whether it be their niche, that they are nice, that they live in Paris, whatever, just put context around why you are recommending them.

This concept was started by Micah Baldwin as a way to allow the "little guys" to get exposure. You can read about it here.

There is also a website where you can see the real-time stream of Follow Friday, that is, anyone putting #followfriday in their tweet.

How to do it:

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.