If you haven’t yet heard of twitter, you would be forgiven for thinking we’re talking about a character out of a bambi book, but no, it is one of the most widely used, addictive social networking tools of 2008.
Twitter can basically be summed up in saying it is a platform to manage a real-time text-mesaging interface where you can follow and post to thousands of people with related interests.
For the internet marketing community, there are thousands of people that share useful\, valuable information as well as the most obscure observations and experiences in their lives – a window into the lives of those of us who make money marketing online.
If you haven’t hyet tried Twitter, head over and sign up, you’ll be able to make your own post right away – start by following me at My Profile and I’ll be among your first followers.
So, what are Twitter Tools then?
Like many social networking sites, Twitter understood early on that opening up its platform to developers and allowing them to create innovative tools to use with the database will result in an entire community of useful tools being developed.
That certainly has happened, there are hundreds of twitter tools available, what I thought I would do today is to highlight just 5 of the MOST useful tools when using twitter:
1. WordPress Twitter Sidebar Widget – if you have a WordPress Blog (and we strongly recommend that you do), you can place a sidebar widget on your blog so that your latest posting activity is visible on your blog – this also allows a quick way for your visitors to follow you on Twitter building your list of followers.
2. Tweetburner – Allows you to shorten, share and track your twitter links, with 140 characters, you will need to shorten many of your link url’s
3. Twitter Phone – this is cool, you can leave a voice message and convert it into a Twitter message (otherwise known as a tweet)
4. Twits Like Me – great tool for searching for other twitter contacts that have like interests – you need to have some basic twitter history here to make this useful, but then it can be a powerful way for quickly growing your network.
5. Twitter Answers – this one shows promise as a way to get exposure answering questions or to get questions you may have on just about anything, almost instantly
There are many other twitter tools, they change almost daily so it’s best to keep your eye on this blog as each week we’ll update any new, useful tools.
