5 Twitter Tools Every Social Media Marketing Campaign Should Use!

John Panico of Social Media Dudes shares his Twitter expertise in this guest post.  To hear more of John and his Twitter secrets, join the free teleseminar on February 23rd.  Register here.

Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networking sites on the planet.  It truly is one of the game changers that if not already a part of your social media marketing campaign, change that today (see my article on Twitter for Business Done Right for proper setup).

If you are looking to either be a Twitter Ninja or perhaps haven’t participated because you were concerned about the time it takes to manage, I am endowing you with what I consider five essential tools that will make you more efficient, save you time, get you the followers that you want and fortify your social media presence.  As a bonus, all of these are free (although you may decide to upgrade to take advantage of some additional feature that some of these tools afford you.

Here they are (as they say on DWTS in no particular order):

• Social Oomph – You may remember this site formally going by Tweetlater.com (which personally I thought was more appropriate).  Nevertheless, I find this tool to be invaluable in how to be efficient on twitter.

One of your objectives with your social media marketing campaign is to appear to be everywhere 24/7.  Let’s get real.  If all you did was tweet all day, you wouldn’t have time to focus on your business. One of the best features that Social Oomph allows is for you to schedule your tweets.  I set aside 1 hour every Sunday morning and plan out 6-8 tweets a day.  Some of them are going to push people to my site because of posts I have scheduled. Others are RT’s (ReTweets) that will bring a lot of love (and followers) back to you.

The other thing that I have found most useful is the Auto DM’s (Direct Message) feature that Social Oomph provides.  Like them or not, as long as you are not selling back in your first response back to a follower, these can be very effective.  You can have rotating DM’s.

• TweetDeck – Twitter is constantly doing things that make it compelling to use their homepage for all of your tweeting.  But if you are like me, I currently have 6 Internet Explorer browsers open along with several other applications.  If I want to quickly and effortlessly take a quick look to see if someone that I am following (or a phrase/keyword) has just tweeted something, it takes a while to do that.

Having to go to the twitter homepage to do that just takes up too much time, so I prefer an application that is sitting there in the background doing all of the work for me.  Some will argue that other applications such as HootSuite or Twirl or just as good.  I am not saying I haven’t used them. I just have found TweetDeck to do it better and cleaner.

TweetDeck allows me to use my Twitter lists or to make groups on my own based on keywords.  How cool is that?  And while it works easily on my desktop or laptop, it also performs just as well on my iPhone or Blackberry.  In my opinion, it is the must-have twitter tool.

• PollDaddy – Part of being involved in social media marketing is well…being involved.  You not only want, but you need engagement with your audience.  If you are shy about getting into the mix, creating a poll not only provides involvement, but can also supply good market research for your product or service.  It allows you to get answers about things much quicker and obviously cheaper (since it is free) than using a marketing firm to do it for you.

With PollDaddy, you can create a poll and send it to your Twitter followers in seconds. No account necessary!

• Twellow – Known as the Yellow Pages for Twitter, this tool can do some amazing and fun things.  Did you ever wonder just how many users in your city were actually on twitter?  Twellow can tell you.  But the best feature by far is geo-targeted followers.  What’s that you say?

If you are a business professional or a local service business, it probably doesn’t do you any good to have followers in Boston if you are located in California.  Number of followers is nice, but targeted followers are a better option. When you get to the home page, click on the TwellowHood tab and then enter your location (and other search terms you are looking for). From there it is easy to follow people that fit your parameters.

• TweetSpinner – How do you know who has the same interests/concerns that you do?  You could do a search on twitter, but once again, that is time consuming.  Perhaps this application is a better and albeit more efficient tool for you to use.

If you aren’t as interested in followers that are geographically in a particular area, this application allows you to automatically follow those who tweet keywords of your design.  The value to that is that those people are going to see the value in your tweets and follow you back.  (You are providing tweets that have value regularly aren’t you?  You should NOT be trying to sell something every tweet…mix it up.) Then you can engage them to see if you can forge an alliance or if after you have shown yourself to be a good twitizen, they will want the goods or services you provide.

All right, off you go and on your way to becoming a Twitter Ninja.  I can tell you from personal experience that when my clients have used these tools effectively, they have told me thank you countless times for giving them more time in their day to work on their businesses and also for the opportunities that have come their way as a result of finding/using these tools.

Are you interested in how to use social media in your business? Don’t know where to start or which sites you should be using for your business?

Believe it or not, not doing social media right can actually harm your business.

If you are looking for free tips or advice on how to approach your social media, go to Social Media Dudes.

Or follow our tweets on Twitter at twitter.com/johnpanico

Finally, those are my thoughts from high atop my 2nd floor office above my garage.  What I want to hear are YOUR comments.  Let Janet know if this post was of help or what other topics you would like to hear about by leaving your comments here.