18 Twitter Tools for Business & Marketing Use

There are many free Twitter tools and apps available today to help make Twitter more productive for yourself and to help you integrate it into your marketing strategy, even allowing you to produce analytical data on Twitter usage on yourself, your followers, and even non-followers in the Twitter universe.  If Twitter isn’t an active part of your strategy already, you really need to start digging in now to become part of the conversations going on about you, your business, your industry, your products, and your competition.

Here is a short list of Twitter tools and apps to get you started or to help improve your already existing Twitter usage and results:

1. bit.ly– tracks clicks on your links in Twitter & also transforms your long URLs to a short URL’s
2. FriendorFollow.com– lets you know who’s following you that you’re not following & vice versa
3. MicroPlaza.com – groups tweets with links that fall under a single topic
4. NearbyTweets.com – see Twitters & tweets from people in your area (great to use at a conference or convention)
5. OutTwit.com – use Twitter from Microsoft Outlook
6. Tweet2Tweet.com – enter in two Twitter user profile names and follow their conversation
7. TweetBeep.com – keep track of who is tweeting about you or your products via email alerts
8. TweetDeck.com – get control of Twitter, split your Twitter feed up, search and group those you follow
9. TweetLater.com– track & schedule your tweets. Auto follow & un-follow those who do the same to you
10. TweetScan.com – search tweets and user profiles
11. TweetStats.com – graph Twitter stats by hour, month; timeline & reply stats
12. TweetVolume.com – enter in a word or phrase and see how often it appears in Twitter
13. TwerpScan.com – check the number of followers of everyone on your contact list, the number of people they are following, and the ratio between those
14. TwitResponse.com – schedule Twitter messages to be sent whenever you want
15. Twitter.PollDaddy.com – create polls that you can send to your followers
16. Twitterfeed.com– posts your blog’s RSS or Atom feed to popular microblogging websites
17. Twitterless.com – alerts you when someone stops following you, graphs follower history
18. Twitterurly.com – tracks, groups, and ranks what people are talking about on Twitter

Feel the need for more tools or apps, or just haven’t found just the right ones for you yet? Here are two huge lists that will occupy you for hours:

• 140 Twitter Tools via Mashable
• 100 Twitter Tools to Help You Achieve All Your Goals

Have any Twitter tools, apps or lists you think should be added to this? Let us know in the comments.