Twitter Lesson: Twitter Tools

These are the basic tools you can use to get going on Twitter:

Tweetlater also lets you set up auto follows so whenever someone follows you, you’ll automatically follow them in return. That can be a pretty neat trick but it’s not the service’s main function.

The biggest reason for using TweetLater is that it lets you set up tweets in advance, a bit like an auto-responder. It means that you can keep your timeline ticking over even while you’re sleeping, working or relaxing. You can use TweetLater to prepare a series of tweets ahead of them going ‘live’.

Twellow can help you find people with similar interests to your own. It’s a kind of Yellow Pages of social media, but it operates more like a Twitter Yahoo! The site tracks conversations on Twitter and places the Twitterers behind them into various categories. Click one of those categories and you’ll be able to see a list of suitable Twitterers, complete with bio, image, and the number of their followers. For Twitterers looking for interesting and useful people to follow, it’s a good tool. Once you start sending tweets, you should find that you’re added automatically, but if you can’t find your name on the site, you can add it yourself. In any case, it’s certainly worth checking the categories that you’ve been listed under and self-editing them if necessary. Keep Twellow close by at www.twellow.com.

The easiest way to begin to explore the vast amount of data that is available inside Twitter is to use its own Search service. At www.Search.twitter.com you can type any search term into the search box, and the service will scan the Twitter universe for tweets that match your terms. If you click on the Advanced Search link you can specify even more granular search parameters and filters. You can, for example, search for people interested in a certain geographic area and search for the terms “need a rental,” but restrict the search to users looking within a location. This will bring back tweets from people wanting specific areas to stay. You can then turn your query into a filter that runs on Twitter servers and creates an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite reader.

You can download a desktop application that’s allows you to tweet from it without logging in every day (or every time). For Mac’s it’s www.twitterific.com and you must buy it. For Windows users, it’s free and called Twitteroo at www.rareedge.com