Twitter – tools I’m using now

Twitter is the newest way to make connections on the internet, and it’s becoming increasingly important for anyone wanting to build their online business.

I started out with just one account in my own name (I was one of the very first to join, so could get the Twitter name Shelagh!)

Then I wanted to have a separate account for Spiritus – the Spiritual Marketing Directory, and suddenly it all started to get very awkward and time-consuming.

But in the online world, where there’s a problem soon there will be a solution.

The most useful solutions I’ve found to date:

TweetDeck – allows you to create Groups of people, or Search subjects, so you can keep an eye on Tweets which particularly interest you. Currently free of charge; the best there is at the moment, but watch for new ones comes along soon.

Twellow – like Yellow pages, but for the Twitter world. Easy to use, great place to find new people with same interests as you.

Twollo is a wonderful, free tool that goes one step further than Twellow, and actually carries out the Follow step for you. You select keywords or phrases, and Twollo automatically follows any one including that keyword in a Tweet. It’s easy to exclude anyone who is not on the same wavelength as you.

I started by just allowing Twollo to find 10 new people for each keyword, and then built up gradually as I got more confident that I had the right keywords.

There is now the option to pay for more updates, and I’ve used this with great success.

I now have several Twitter accounts (blame my Butterfly brain!) so I was delighted to discover *Tweetlater. The free version does most things that most people want, but there is a paid version with a few more useful tools like setting a time for your Tweets to go out (useful if you want to send something to a different time-zone whilst you sleep!).

Finally, you will maybe want to Unfollow people who are not following you, and the best tool I’ve found for this is Twitter Karma. It is free to use, but there is the option to make a donation which I do because it is such a useful tool.

These all work for me, are all free (in their basic form) and I’m very grateful to the people who have created them!