Twitter apps

Using Twitter.com for SEO learning and strategic white hat SEO is great and becoming rapidly common.

For those search engine optimisation peops that are a bit anti social media and are reluctantly moving towards Twitter usage I thought a summary of some of the great social media applications for desktops (and smartphones) would be useful.

Initially, you create your Twitter account and you can use their own client for all of your messages. This is particularly appropriate if you have a personal account that you want to use to say ‘Hi I’m here’ and have an objective of 50% business tweets and 50% personal/leisure tweets. Core functionality of tweeting, retweeting, following/unfollowing, direct messaging, managing lists, hash tagging, people searching profile editing enables you to get to base 1 – absolutely great for feeling your way into Twitter.com. I quite like doing a proportion of my Twitter activity using the Twitter.com app, particularly good on iPhone where you can tweet across multiple accounts in one action and follow pan account with one tap. Of course you will have to login in to Twitter.com to make any edits to your Bio, profile including background and avatar. Note that some 3rd party Twitter apps will supply links to edit profile but these will click out to the relevant areas When you get into a scalable position of wanting to shorten URLs, create multiple search query feeds, schedule activity or share a Twitter account across a team or locations – then you need to look at some of the weird and wonderful world of Twitter clients.

It was announced that on the 25th May 2011 Tweetdeck.com was acquired by Twitter.com which in itself is an advertorial to this superb Twitter client. Tweetdeck makes you feel the pulse of Twitter, bringing home the rapid fire and huge waves of content and sorting it out. Tweetdeck offer a free and low cost multiple user option – the free version is superb. Tweetdeck has led the way with query searching, giving advanced search options with the use of speech marks to allow for exact match style searching. You can snoop, lurk, spy, monitor and identify fellow Tweeters – power at your finger tips. This is how to get to grips with trending. You can see with your own geeky Twitter eyes what trend terms move quickly, slowly and querky (geniune) trends. Where Tweetdeck wins out is the front end UI. It is pretty to the eye, illustrating feed columns beautifully with the ghost prompts providing you with core tweet info as you work. You will increase a deeper understanding of Twitter but beware of the addictivness potential. Voyeuristic Twitter at its best!

Hootsuite.com goes head to head with Tweetdeck in the most popular free applications with a core strength of scheduling. It is worth mentioning that both Hootsuite and Tweetdeck can be used for other social sites such as Facebook and Foursquare but lets stay on Twitter for now. You can schedule tweets specifying date / time, whether you’d like email confirmations and with Twitter (only) you get a column showing what is scheduled named ‘pending columns’. Everything else is similar to Tweetdeck – you can shorten URLs, see your mentions/home/DMs and login to multiple Twitter accounts. Hootsuite recently ran some enhancements which means that you can search on keyword terms to compete more with Tweetdeck. Also the stats element (paid version) has improved significantly. As with ‘the deck’, multiple account users are at an additional low cost.

Cotweet.com has taken things to a new level, offering multiple account access for free. Set up your account, connecting to your Twitter and then you can assin email addresses as new users. The new user receives an email inviting them to configure your new account from there. Once you’re in, the standard channel view is like almost like an email inbox where ‘home’ and inbound tweets from followers are brought together within ‘inbox’ and then ‘outbox’ pulls together scheduled and sent. You can set up ‘CoTags’ which allow you to put short signatures on different users. Big brands are going down this route and then use their background to show the various authors of their Twitter page. Then you can archive Twitter threads, for any mad Tweet days. One last thing I like – when you search for people, it shows their Klout score against their main Twitter stats. Cotweet is powerful.

Then there are sites like Ping.fm and Social oomph with quite similar offerings – great free functionality and then a paid few bucks per month option with similar options. I like the Twitter automation features with Social oomph where you can automate following new followers, vet new followers and send DMs to new followers. All of these features are subjective and in my opinion are worth testing for your product/service/brand.

In the WordPress.org world, check out tools such as WordPress tweeter and Socialite to push out any new blog posts – perfect for any bedroom bloggers that are looking to boost social traffic referral with the clear benefit of saving time. This illustrates another point that Twitter can be incredibly time consuming so work out your strategy and set defined time where you WON’T be tweeting.

OK – hope this wasn’t too waffley – if it was, here is a concise recommendation: Cotweet!

I would value any comments on these Twitter apps and any that you have come across that kick a$$!