Social Media Examiner recently published an interview with Laura Fitton, founder of Oneforty and co-author of Twitter for Dummies.
Oneforty, which was acquired by HubSpot this year, is the Twitter app store. They post ratings, reviews, and business use case studies on apps specific to Twitter.
As Laura points out in the interview, Twitter apps used to focus on how to manage Twitter; now, they do everything.
What will never change, though, is how to use Twitter. Be useful. Retweet useful, funny, inspiring – whatever – tweets that will resonate with your followers. Reply to people who DM or mention you. Mention others.
One thing I would NOT do: FollowFriday (#FF), unless you specifically mention why you are following all of those people. The way most people do it now is ridiculous – just a bunch of Twitter handles with no rhyme or reason as to why they are so great.
Another thing I would not do: automated replies. They smack of laziness. Twitter is for conversations, not bullhorns, and because automated replies are so generic, you end up talking to no one.
Back to Twitter apps.
At Oneforty, apps are broken out by category: advertising, analytics, automated follows and tweets, brand tracking, business dashboards, marketing, productivity, and social CRM. I decided to browse the site and learn what people are using and loving that would be useful for a small business to use. Here are my top picks:
Offerpop makes 3 marketing apps. The Offer app lets you create and run open promotion; the Exclusive app lets you share special offers or content; and the Viral app lets you create offers that become valid only if a certain number of people retweet the offer.
TwitHawk is a real time targeted marketing engine that finds people by location who are talking about a certain topic, allowing you to reach them while the conversation is taking place.
Sprout Social lets you manage and grow your social presence with a variety of communication tools; they also offer contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, analytics and other tools.
TweetStats helps you find out basic stats about your account including how many times you tweet per month, who you replied to the most, what words you commonly use in all your tweets, etc. It all gets graphed out.
TwitSprout analyzes high activity Twitter accounts and lets you combineTwitter data with other marketing analytics.
What Twitter apps do you use? Leave a comment below!
Image courtesy of creative design agency Arrae.
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