The Executive Suite: How to Cut Through the Twitter Clutter

With over 645 million active users, Twitter is a social media platform that businesses must learn to master. Twitter sees over 58 million tweets every single day, which means marketers face a double edged sword each time they launch a 140 word campaign:

There’s an almost endless number of eyeballs to read and take action on their messages and
There’s an almost endless amount of competition vying for that same attention.

To compete, small businesses need to do more than just send an unstructured onslaught of tweets. Twitter campaigns work only when they are part of a bigger picture, well thought-out, and aimed at precisely the ideal customer. All of this requires the right suite of tweet tools to properly execute.
Staying on the cutting edge of Twitter-themed apps can feel like a full-time job itself. Below is a bundle of stellar tools. Find the ones that most reflect your social strategy, and let them amplify your results right away.

#1. Twitter’s Own Analytics
In case you haven’t noticed yet, Twitter now offers analytics tools to all users. This is definitely your easiest and most obvious choice. To see how your tweets are measuring up, visit analytics.twitter.com. You can access the following (and of course it’s completely free):

Overall engagement percentage
Click-throughs
Individual tweet engagement, retweets, and favorites

This is a fantastic foundation to study which of your missives get clicks and re-shares, and which fall into the abyss.

#2. Joocier: Recipes for Twitter Success
Joocier calls itself “the core of your social media strategy”, and they are not exaggerating. This extremely powerful tool lets you manage and analyze Twitter accounts through something they call “custom recipes.” These recipes are essentially short cuts to uncovering deep data and clear trends. Marketers can carve out recipes that suit the exact metrics they need to analyze. Jooicer also allows complete Twitter automation, shared recipes (great if you need inspiration), and highly detailed analytics reports.

#3. A Free and Easy Way to Build Your Audience
For startups and small businesses just starting to make a Twitter splash, free tool Flounder is a must. It’s a simple concept: have all your team members running Flounder in the background, and it will help grow your Twitter audience. Here’s how it works:

Each time a team member has 3 or more @replies on their personal Twitter account, your company account will automatically follow them.
If they do not follow you back within a period of time, they are unfollowed, and the system will not contact them for any reason again. (This is coming soon.)

Flounder therefore organically builds an audience of folks who are probably like-minded, since they are associates of team members. It’s an elegant Twitter tool for all the newbies out there.

#4. Social Brand Engagement
Justyn Howard, CEO of tried and tested marketing tool extraordinaire ‘Sprout Social’ (http://www.sproutsocial.com), says this about current social engagement: “The growth, relevance and reputation of today’s organizations are being shaped by social conversations. Customer care and communication have changed forever. In order to succeed, you must #BePresent.”
Must Be Present is an answer to that call, an “experiment in social brand engagement” from the Sprout Social creators. Must Be Present helps marketers gauge their brands actual social responsiveness in real-time, then provides data to compare to industry benchmarks. This lets you have a context for your social metrics, and gives you the ability to see how you measure up against the competition.

#5. Easy, Effective Twitter Ad Campaigns
Twitter isn’t just for tweeting; it’s an advertiser’s dream, when utilized correctly. Soda takes the mystery out of Twitter ad campaigns and allows marketers to publish campaigns (3 steps and you’re live), use real-time optimization options, and review full campaign reports that could win an art award. They are currently in a private beta, but you can sign-up to stay informed on when it goes live to the world. Soda already has some big name brands as testers, so this is definitely one tool to watch if you need help with simplifying Twitter promotions.

#6. Making Twitter Interactions More Personal
Twitter is a special platform because it allows brands to connect personally with their customers. This is obviously time consuming when done on a case by case basis, so tools like Riffle are a godsend. This fabulous free tool is a browser add-on, and once activated, it’s an ideal partner in any influencer marketing campaigns. Riffle lets you build a rapport with your audience, and provides insight into the potential value of each user. This allows you to prioritize your level of engagement.
#7. University of Missouri Reveals the Wave of the Twitter Future

Most Twitter marketers pay close attention to trending topics. This data displays only those with the highest quantity, but doesn’t provide any qualitative data about the actual tweets. Enter the smart folks from the University of Missouri who have developed new Twitter-focused software that analyzes event-based tweets and measures not only the quantity, but actual context of the content.
“Trends on Twitter are almost always associated with hashtags, which only gives you part of the story,” Sean Goggins, assistant professor in the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies at MU stated. “When analyzing tweets that are connected to an action or event, looking for specific words at the beginning of the tweets gives us a better indication of what is occurring, rather than only looking at hashtags.”

This will be big news for marketers when it’s available to the mass public, as well as officials in safety and law enforcement, and various other positions of authority. To give context to trending topics will be powerful info indeed, so watch for this to light up your Twitter world even more in the near future.

What other Twitter tools can you not live without?