Ivygirl Media & Design

Top 8 Must-Have Twitter Apps

If you were one of those that thought Twitter was just another fad, you might now be thinking twice. Everyone it seems, is on Twitter and with the multitude of 3rd-party applications popping up everywhere, it has become one of the most prominent social media tools available today.

But regardless of how popular Twitter is, it doesn’t do you any good if you don’t know how to maximize its potential. And that’s where all those apps come in. Unfortunately, there are tons and tons of those apps – which ones should you choose?

Here’s my list of the top 8 must-have applications for your twitter profile:

Twitter Feed

Twitter Feed is a nifty little tool – it feeds your blog’s RSS to your Twitter profile so anytime you make a new blog post, it’s automatically posted to your Twitter account as well.

You can even set a prefix phrase such as “From Our Blog” or “New On MyBlog.com”… cool, huh?

The only caveat to using this app is that you don’t want to rely solely on Twitter Feed to do your posting as this defeats the whole purpose of having the Twitter account to start with – which is, in case you’re wondering – creating a personal venue where you can interact with your followers.

Seesmic

Seesmic is great for those who have multiple Twitter accounts which, if you manage several blogs, you probably fall into that category.

You can see and post to all your Twitter accounts simultaneously and (and this is the biggie) you can also immediately see who’s mentioned you on their Twitter profile, either through retweets or replies.

You can install Seesmic on your desktop or use it as a web-based application.

Matt

And speaking of managing multiple Twitter accounts, I LOVE Matt… Matt is simple, straightforward and great for saving time.

Add all of your Twitter accounts to your Matt profile and then pick and choose which ones to post to as you tweet. If I want to post to all, I can do that. If I want to post to these two Twitter accounts but not those, I can do that too.

But I only have to type the tweet once.

Twhirl

Twhirl is an interesting little application – it allows you to cross-post your Twitter updates to other social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. It allows you to create shortened URLs via Digg, Tiny and other such services and it automatically finds tweets that mention your @username.

TwitSig

Another must-have, TwitSig turns your last tweet into an eye-catching graphic that you can use in your signature files. Use this to promote your Twitter profile in your email signatures, your forum signatures and wherever else you’d like to get some free PR.

Here’s a sample:

TwitScoop

While Twitscoop let’s you manage your tweets and followers from their interface, that’s not why I like it. Instead, this app’s most savory feature is the fact that it lets you see what other Twitterers are talking about in real time. This is important if you’re trying to see what’s hot and what’s not, information many social media marketers consider to be golden.

TwitPic

This is a simple app but a powerful one – TwitPic allows you to share images on Twitter and we all know just how important images can be. Use of the app is free – just sign in with your existing Twitter account login.

Bit.ly

If you’ve used Twitter at all then you know that those long URL links take up some of your precious character count. Enter bit.ly, a free, online URL shortener. But that’s not all this app does – register (free) and you can track those links to see what’s getting clicked.