10 Innovative Twitter Tools For The Busy Freelancer

Twitter is one of the most valuable channels online. Using it to connect with potential clients or simply building a strong network is crucial. Yet, moving forward on Twitter can also be very time consuming. Finding tools which help us to focus more on the work we are doing is key.

So here are 10 new and innovative tools to harvest more of Twitter’s power

1. Tweriod – Start tweeting when others listen

Although there exist a few different apps measuring your best times to Tweet, Tweriod comes out as the best. It analyses your past tweets and the ones of your followers and then gives you a detailed graph for when it is best to tweet. The results show you the exact hours of each individual weekday so you can go away immediately and start tweeting at these times. This helps particularly in connection with a publishing App as you can set up these best tweeting times on a schedule.

Best bit: What I love is that you will be sent a DM straight to your inbox once the report is ready, as gathering all this data takes a little while.

Give it a go here: Tweriod

2. Twylah – Fanpages for your Twitter account

Twylah is a fantastic solution to keep your Tweets fresh for a longer period of time. It gathers your sent tweets and organizes them into a personalized page displaying richer content then just links. By referring others to your Twylah page you can give users a better overview of what your tweeting is about. I found that this is a lot more effective than just glancing at other people’s stream as these most recent tweets might not reflect the complete picture.

Best bit: Twylah offers a functionality that is called “Power Tweets”, which result in increased engagement then normal tweets do as related content is gathered around it.

Give it a go here: Twylah

3. Strawberryj.am – Only read the most important news

This is an App I have come to love. It pulls in all your followers tweets and shows you only the most relevant ones. It does so by determining which ones were the most mentioned and talked about and orders them in a list for you. This means, instead of scanning your Twitter stream for hours, you can just log into Strawberryj.am and get the most discussed news at one glance.

Best bit: What I like most is that you can also get personalized updates of your Strawberryj.am straight to your inbox.

Give it a go here: StrawberryJ.am

4. Ifttt – Optimise Your Tweeting

This nifty new App allows you to create social triggers in order to connect the syndication of your various accounts more easily. So for example if you save a new bookmark to delicious, then a tweet will be posted. Or if you are mentioned on Twitter you want an email to be sent. You can optimize it fully to your needs.

Best bit: Different to other syndication Apps such as dlvr.it or Twitterfeed you can be a lot more creative by linking natively completely unrelated apps.

Give it a go here: Ifttt

5. KeepStream – Collect your most valuable Tweets

Another recent discovery of mine is an App called KeepStream. It allows you to make collections of tweets and organize them in more readable format. You can try collecting a few of these tweets and then embed them as a blogpost on your site. One example I found very handy is to use KeepStream to collect tweets from an event or a Twitterchat to share it with people who couldn’t attend.

Best bit: The fact that you can follow others and see their tweet collections makes for a richer experience of past tweets.

Give it a go here: KeepStream

6. ManageFlitter – Unfollow others with ease

This is by far the most intuitive Tool I came across in order to help me clean up my Twitter account. It shows you who of the people you are following isn’t following back, who is cluttering your timeline and who is no longer active. Just give it a few clicks and unfollow those not adding enough value to your stream.

Best bit: What like most is that you don’t have to fiddle with creating an account. Simple sign in with Twitter, unfollow unwanted followers and off you go.

Give it a go here: ManageFlitter

7. TwitSprout – Onepage analytics dashboard

Finding out about the most important metrics for your Twitter account can often be confusing. Twitsprout however does a brilliant job on giving you only the most important metrics such as increase in followers, listings and mentions over time. You can also brand them with your own logo, so it turns into a beautiful infographic you can share elsewhere.

Best bit: The App allows you to export the data as a PDF report, that I found particularly useful to use for offline presentations.

Give it a go here: TwitSprout

8. Commun.it – Build out your Twitter Tribe

This is another very innovative idea for an App. Commun.it shows you all your followers and orders them by most engaged, supporters and influencers. This means you can focus on these interactions and build out your network beyond these connections. I found this particularly useful to know whom I should engage with more in order to get noticed.

Best bit: What I like best is that the App suggests you potential leads showing mentions of your brand or blog outside your network.

Give it a go here: Commun.it

9. Proxlet – Unclutter your stream

One of my all time favourites is a very helpful App called Proxlet. It allows you to filter out certain Twitter users, hashtags or keywords from your stream. So you can get rid of unwanted paper.li or Foursquare tweets, that don’t add value to your timeline. It is also very helpful to filter out hashtags if there is an event happening you aren’t interested in following.

Best bit: In addition to Twitter.com Proxlet also works on major Twitter clients such as Twitter for Iphone, Tweetdeck and Twitdroyd.

Give it a go here: Proxlet

10. Buffer – Never Flood Your Followers Again

(Full disclosure: I work on Buffer) Buffer gives you a complete new way to send out Tweets. Whenever you find an interesting article, give it one click on the Buffer icon with one of the browser extensions (Chrome, Safari or Firefox). This will “Buffer” your tweet and post it for you well spaced out over the day. So you can add lots of tweets whilst reading the news, but never flood your followers.
Best bit: Buffer also allows you to add tweets to multiple Twitter accounts and even works on Twitter.com to Buffer some RTs.

Give it a go here: Buffer

These are my favourite new Twitter Apps at the moment. I hope some of them are useful for you too. Do you think any of the above can help you be more efficient too?