10 Twitter Apps for Marketing Small Businesses
Monday, April 6, 2009
By: Susan Gunelius
There are so many Twitter apps available that it can be nearly impossible to keep track of all of them. Worse yet, it’s hard to find the ones that can actually help promote your small business effectively. Check out the 10 Twitter apps listed below. Each one can help you market your business and each is worth taking the time to experiment with.
1. Bubble Tweet
www.bubbletweet.com/
I love this Twitter app because it allows users to post short video messages that pop up on their Twitter profiles when someone visits. This is a great way to leverage the popularity of online video in a unique way. You can promote your business, a product, a special, whatever you want!
2. twtQpon
twtqpon.com/
This Twitter app allows users to create coupons for their businesses, products, services, and so on and share them with their Twitter followers. It’s a great way to promote special offers and to reward your Twitter followers.
3. Monitter
monitter.com/
This Twitter app is perfect for keeping track of what’s being said about your brand and business on Twitter. To use Monitter, you simply type in up to three keywords, and a live stream of tweets using those keywords shows up on your screen. In the words of Monitter, “cool huh?”
4. CoTweet
cotweet.com/
This Twitter app gives you the ability to create one Twitter account that multiple employees can access and tweet through. Each user has a separate profile, but you can easily keep track of their activities.
5. Tweetburner
tweetburner.com/
This Twitter app does two things. The first provides function - it allows you to shorten URLs, so they don’t take up as much character space in your tweets. The second provides research and analysis - it allows you to track the clicks on your tweets, so you can see which types of messages are actually helping you meet your business objectives for your Twitter time investment.
6. TwitterCounter
twittercounter.com/
If you have a business blog (and you should if you’re tweeting because they work hand-in-hand in terms of social media marketing), then you should have some kind of badge on your blog that invites people to follow you on Twitter. If you use Twitter Counter, you can include a badge on your blog that not only invites readers to follow you on Twitter but also shows the number of Twitter followers you have. The perception is that if a lot of other people are following you, then you must have great things to say and others should follow you, too else they might miss something.
7. TwitThis
www.twitthis.com/
This Twitter app works the same way that “Share This” or “Digg This” links that appear on blogs and other websites work. In short, when you include the Twit This button on your blog or website, TwitThis makes it very easy for someone to tweet about your content. That person just clicks the TwitThis button and their Twitter profile opens where the necessary information, link, etc. is automatically entered into a new tweet update. It’s that easy! I love blogs that have TwitThis, and I use it often when I see it!
8. Tweetbeep
tweetbeep.com/
This Twitter app is an alert system (often compared to Google Alerts). You just enter in the keywords that you want to track, and Tweetbeep sends an email to you with links to Twitter updates that include those keywords. It’s a great way to keep track of mentions of your business, brands, products, competitors, and so on.
9. Twitter Toolbar
thetwittertoolbar.com/
The Twitter Toolbar isn’t so much a marketing tool as it is a timesaving tool, which frees up your time for less busywork and more promotion. The Twitter Toolbar works in Internet Explorer and Firefox, and allows you to visit Twitter with one click, update your Twitter status, conduct searches, and more.
10. TwitterHawk
www.twitterhawk.com/
This Twitter app turns your Twitter experience into what might be referred to as a hard sales tool. It seems a bit intrusive for many businesses, but I’m still going to mention it because many entrepreneurs might be interested in testing it. With TwitterHawk, you select keywords and specific locations and create a . TwitterHawk sends Twitter users in that location a message you create (when and how you choose) whenever they use those keywords in their own Twitter updates. TwitterHawk is not free, so be sure to read all the details before you give it a try
