Twitter has hundreds, if not thousands, of extremely useful and incredibly helpful tools and applications to help you proactively manage your Twitter account on an ongoing basis. Tools and applications that allow you to analyze Twitter trends and statistics specific to your account, help you to build and manage your Twitter following, automate your Twittering to keep your account active and on schedule (very important) and a whole host of other tools that can help to make managing your account simple and highly productive.
Twitter offers a wide-open API (letting developers’ access all the same public data available to Twitter itself) providing an open forum for developers to build these tools. It is because of this API accessibility that Twitter has become more of a platform than a service. Hundreds (thousands?) of websites, iPhone apps, desktop programs, and other Twitter applications have sprung up to make it easier for you to interact with Twitter.
It’s important to know that you don’t need to install one of these 3rd-party clients to use Twitter though. While any of the most popular Twitter applications have made Twittering far more manageable for business owners, you can always just login and use the Twitter website directly.
Twitter allows you to connect with other people in a way no other medium can.
Many frequent Twitter users have reported they have developed relationships with industry leaders that started with just a single Tweet. It is not uncommon for businesses to develop working relationships through Twitter. Acquiring new customers and more website traffic is one of the major benefits of using Twitter to grow your business.
Constant contact can be a very important part of reaching your customers but you also need to ensure you are providing pertinent and timely information. You should use your account to post questions and informal surveys. In addition to posting daily, you should follow the Tweets of others who are talking about your business. You can get valuable customer feedback for product improvements just from listening to the Tweets about your business.
The most you have to invest in Twitter, and much of social media marketing in general, is your time. The drawback to using Twitter is you can get carried away rather easily by getting caught up in what everyone is saying. To counteract the potential for “time-suck”, it’s important to use some of these Twitter applications and tools that we’ve outlined above to ensure that you’re maximizing your productivity and the return on your time invested.
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