Are New Analytical Tools Giving Twitter NEW Life?

I’ve been participating in the One Coach Social Media for Small Business Seminars over the last few weeks.  I’m not sure what my expectations were (well, I guess you could say that they were HIGH)!  AND Scott Allen, author of The Virtual Handshake and his supporting team at One Coach have exceeded them again.

This week’s session was mostly on Twitter.  As he has every week, Scott has elegantly taken this small business band of social media upstarts quickly through the basics without boring us to tears.  Then he jumped into what I’d call the really good stuff.

First a confession.  I had disconnected from Twitter when it turned it’s focus from relationships to sneak peaking into the lives of mega celebrities and when spammers took over.  But the tools that Scott Allen shared with us today got me really excited about the possibility of strategically managing my Twitter activity and re-engaging with my community.

So let me take you on a Tour of Twitter Tools.  First we’ll start with LOOKING at everything and managing your conversations.  Then we’ll take a look at our Twitter Grade, clean our follower lists and find out when to Tweet most.

HootSuite: This is the social media maven’s favorite social networking management tool.  I love that it’s online (nothing to download) and you can manage EVERY social media account you have on every network.  Each one has a new tab.  Absolutely time saving heaven.

HubSpot Twitter Grader: HubSpot is creating a lot of great karma out there as they make the small business social media users smarter.  They give absolutely LOADS of information out for free to help you build and manage a more powerful and engaging web site.  Start with their “Web Site Grader” and “Twitter Grader” tools.  HubSpot will use it’s smart software to crawl your site and your Twitter ID and tell you exactly how well you’re doing and where and how to improve.

The next spot on our Twitter Power Tour is to Twitalyzer.com. Simply enter your Twitter ID and Twitalyzer will go to work outlining your performance in over 20 attributes.  Even though  my score is good — I could certainly do better by Retweeting more and being more generous.  Really useful tool to help you target and focus your time on Twitter.

So when should you Tweet the most?  When will your tweets be seen by the most people and when is the best time to have conversations with your community?  To find out, check out Whentotweet.com.  This tool will look at your followers and analyze WHEN most of them are Tweeting.  I found out that my optimum Tweeting time is in the afternoon.

What about making your list more powerful.  You know you can’t really have any kind of relationship with more than 150 people.  So it makes sense to focus on the people that you will be most useful to and that will be most useful to you. Check out Refollow.com .  This is a fantastic, elegant and fun way to manage your followers.  I used it to un-follow people who had not updated their Twitter in the last few days or who didn’t have a picture AND didn’t update.  This just makes sure that I didn’t have any spammers on my list.

I’ve just this minute learned about a NEW Twitter tool called Tweasier.com.  Tweasier  is primarily an analytical tool that helps Twitter users (especially business users) take control of their account.  In much the same way that you look at Google Analytics to see if your site is achieving it’s marketing goals – you will be able to do the same thing with Tweasier.  Check it out for yourself and see.

So, if you’re like me and have sort of lost your enthusiasm for Twitter because it’s spammy and crowded, I hope that these tools will re-inspire you to give it a go and really make your marketing efforts on Twitter more effective.