PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2015
by Frances Caballo, Author and Social Media Strategist
 Frances Caballo I’m a huge fan of Twitter. It’s my number-one source for traffic to my website. And I also love Twitter because it has led to meeting people around the world who have helped me make book sales around the world.
Numerous applications can help you become more efficient on this platform. Here are some of my favorite time-saving tools.
My Top Tweet
Enter the username of any user on Twitter and this app will instantly analyze that person’s past 3,200 tweets to show you their top 10 retweeted tweets.
You can use this app to discover what your trading partners and readers are tweeting and see their results. Also, you can use it to determine what content performs well enough so that you’d want to retweet it. Or you can use it as a content curation tool.
SocialBro
SocialBro can help you make good use of Twitter analytics, insights, and statistics.
More specifically, it can help you:
- find new followers
- import e-mail databases
- discover your best times to tweet
- launch direct message campaigns (although so many people misuse direct messages that some users—like me—delete them without reading them)
- easily discover retweeters
- track follower retention
What’s the downside? SocialBro has a steep learning curve, and the monthly fee increases as you add followers and as you follow more people.
Still, this may be an application worth trying for a couple of months since it integrates with Buffer, a robust scheduling application that now integrates with Pinterest, and it can be very useful to know when your tweets need to hit your followers’ timelines. I suggest you start with the free version.
Hashtagify
I love this app!
Hashtagify, which is free, describes itself as “the most advanced Twitter Hashtags search engine.” Since its development in 2011, it has analyzed 3,696,922,062 tweets.
Type in any hashtag and Hashtagify will rate its prominence on Twitter. Use these hashtags in your tweets, when appropriate, to increase your retweets. Remember, though, that results change depending on the time of day you enter a hashtag.
Hashtagify will also tell you who are the top influencers using a particular hashtag. When I input #amwriting, I got this list.
- AdviceToWriters
- TheKindleWhispe
- Kindlemojo
- AuthorNetwork
- IAN_AuthorPromo
- CSLakin
Twitonomy
A free Twitonomy account will provide you with a colorful analysis of your Twitter profile, including information about the users you most often reply to, mention, and retweet. It will also tell you the number of lists other users have added you to since you opened your account. And the app lists your most retweeted tweets and those messages that received the highest number of favorites.
Enter the Twitter handle of anyone else and you can get the same data about them.
Swayy
I’m including this application because I use it primarily with Twitter, although I view it as a content curation application.
Let me back up. When you get the free version of this app, you give Swayy the keywords for your main interests. Then, every morning, Swayy sends you an e-mail with links to five of the top blog posts in your niche or subject area.
You can share one or more of the blog posts immediately, in an hour, or in a range of variations over the next 24 hours. And you can schedule your tweet or add a post to LinkedIn or Facebook as well. Yep. This handy tool saves me a ton of time.
Bluenod
Useful for finding new followers, Bluenod lets you enter a username or hashtag, and then produces a detailed map or visualization about the community around the user or the people using the hashtag.
Twubs
If you enjoy taking part in Twitter chats, this application is the one to use.
What I like about Twubs is that you’ll never need to enter the Twitter chat hashtag. Just type your tweet and Twubs will add it for you. You can also see what everyone is tweeting during a chat right from Twubs.
In addition, you can use this app to discover conversations, and if you want to host your own chat, you can use it to create a branded hashtag page. Finally, you can use Twubs to register a hashtag for your chat.
ManageFlitter
With a free account, you can unfollow users who aren’t following you back. With a paid account, you can do so much more, including:
- sort your followers and those following you
- find new people to follow after setting up specific criteria
- use the PowerPost feature so that your tweets will be sent when most of your followers are on Twitter
- track keywords
- follow users selected other people are following
- make sure that you never accidentally unfollow certain users
Topsy
Topsy is a search engine for Twitter. You can type in your username or a hashtag of your choice. When I used the hashtag #amwriting recently, I learned that there had been 480 tweets with this hashtag in the previous hour and 31,000 in the previous four hours.
You can use Topsy to find influencers on a specific topic, to find the most recent and relevant tweets based on a keyword search, and to see what’s trending under a specific hashtag.
Frances Caballo is an author, a social media strategist, and a manager for writers as well as a contributing writer for The Book Designer. Her book Twitter Just for Writers is free at http://bit.ly/1qo5Htt. To learn more: socialmediajustforwriters.com.
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