Business Tools Blog

Tweepler is a more enjoyable way of sifting through your new Twitter followers. From the list of new followers, you sort them into one of two stacks; Follow if you wish to follow them back or Ignore if you don’t wish to follow them. Ignoring them will archive them out of the way, reducing clutter.

Monitter shows a live streaming view at what Twitter users in your location are saying about you or your small business. Double click the keywords at the top of each column and replace them with keywords you would like to search for. Then select the radius to see what the people in surrounding areas are saying about those words. It is a great tool to gear your marketing toward a specific niche or for choosing one keyword versus another in your ads.

Ping.fm allows the updating of more than 30 social media sites at once. The updates do NOT need to be made from the Ping.fm site. Updates may be sent via SMS (text message), email, instant messenger (AIM, yahoo, msn, etc), iGoogle and several others. With the multiple ways to send a new “tweet”, it’s remarkably easy to post regularly.

Futuretweets schedules tweets to post at specific times; they can reoccur daily, weekly, monthly and yearly if needed. This app will help you feel less like a slave to your Twitter posts. All of the day’s posts can be done first thing in the morning or even a week at a time, freeing you up to focus elsewhere.

Bit.ly shrinks URLs down to fewer characters. This makes it easier to fit links and other text into Twitter’s 140 character limitation. Bit.ly also allows tracking for the link, so you can see how many people are going to the sites you are suggesting. A few other sites that shrink URLs are: Is.gd, Sn.im, tiny.cc, and tinyurl.com.

Twittersafe backs up a list of your followers. Once the backup is complete, it offers a .csv file download so you can keep a hard copy of the list.

Twtapps has several apps geared towards businesses. To name a few, Twtapps offers an app for coupon codes, one to create polls and a business directory.

This is a very minimal list to get you started. I will be putting together another list of different apps; some of the “mashups”, as they are called, tie other aspects of the web to Twitter.