Understand Your Niche

OK, so after using Twitter for a while, we’ve developed a toolchest that contains a few tools we find useful. Please comment on this post to suggest tools that we have missed and that you consider indispensible. So here we go, in no particular order:

1. If you use Firefox for browsing, you should have TwitterFox installed in your browser. It’s an add-on that provides a lot of functions that make a tweeter’s life easier and more convenient.
2. With TwitZap, you get a very nice alternative browser based Twitter interface. Everything happens w/o refreshing, which is… refreshing
3. If you’d rather use a desktop application to get your twitter fix, then TweetDeck is a must. It’s super-feature rich, and very robust.
4. Backing up your twitter presence is a must, and we find Tweetake complete, convenient, reliable, and very fast.
5. To keep your timeline active when you must be away, or during periods of low inspiration, you can use Twaitter to inject pre-scheduled tweets into your timeline, to keep your followers well fed. We also use it to remind people to do their backups, and to help some of our  own and our friends’ sites get traffic.
6. You can see how well your twitter presence is doing by using Twitter Grader. It gives you an overall grade — ours is 99.3 what’s yours?
7. The Twitalyzer site gives you a very deep and detailed insight into how your twitter account is growing in terms of influence, reach, and impact.
8. TwitterCounter provides a nice graph view of how your number of followers is growing over time, and predicts where you’ll be in 30 days.
9. So you have a huge follower list — which ones are actually active and listening to you? Find out with Twitoria and use it to prune your following list so you don’t waste follow slots on following back inactive tweeps.
10. We use tr.im to shorten URLs. It’s a very nice tool, provides the absolute shortest URLs, and has powerful real-time stats on how many clicks your shortened URLs are getting.
11. Did you know that twitter itself has a very powerful search tool? It finds tweets by account name, by keyword, by hash tag, etc. Very useful.
12. To watch trends as they are developing and fading, use TwitScoop — very entertaining.
13. Want to draw special attention to your tweets? Use FlipTitle — but use it sparingly.
14. Find out what URLs are popular on twitter right now, with TwitUrly, kinda like Digg-for-twitter.
15. Get alerts when a keyword thats interesting for you gets a lot of discussion, with TweetBeep.
16. Keep track of the tweeple you like and dislike, and rank them, with TwitTangle.

These are the tools that we find the most useful. We’re sure you have your own. Please tell us about them via your comments, and we’ll gladly add them to our arsenal and to this list!