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Using Twitter is a great way to manage existing clients and source new clients. However, managing an aggressive Twitter campaign for your business is not an easy task.

The Twitter home page is designed to be simple.  It’s like a bike with training wheels.  Most “power-user” Tweeple don’t even go to the Twitter home page to manage their exiting Twitter accounts.  Using the Twitter homepage to manage an aggressive twitter campaign can be painful.   Fortunately there are a few tools that can help you to monitor and manage your Twitter account.

Tools to View and Send Tweets

TwitterFox – (Free) Is a great tool for people that use the Firefox Browser.

TweetDeck – (Free) A Desktop clients that allows you to View Multiple columns, and adds in you Facebook account too.

Seesmic – (Free) Similar to TweetDeck

Twitterific – (Free and Not Free) For the Mac Geeks.

Tweetlater - (Free and Not Free) Let’s you schedule Tweets.

Tools to Follow Trends

Twitterfall – A great way to insert yourself in a relevant conversation and find potential new followers organically.

#Hashtags – Works great for people that use the Hashtag, but may be losing some relevance in the age of better Twitter search functionality.

Search Twitter – Works.

Tools to Manage Followers

Twellow – Sort of like the Yellow Pages for Twitter…  great feature is the Twellowhood.  Helps you to find regional followers.

My Tweeple – Manage all your people in one place.  Interfaces with Twitter, the ratios are very interesting to use when making a follow choice.

Quitter – Tells you when people stop following you

Friend or Follow – Lets you see who is sharing your Twitter love, and helps you to quickly identify who is following you.

Of course this is just the beginning.  Jennifer Web Design in Las Vegas offers free initial consultation on how you can use Twitter to promote your business.  Contact Us to schedule an appointment today.

Of course…  this is just a starter list.  There are plenty of other tools as well.  What are your favorite tools?

I was once a Twitter evangelical nerd.  I sat on the mountaintop and preached that if anyone was well positioned to “kill” Google it would be Twitter.  It made perfect sense to me.

To recap:

• Twitter can provide an instantaneous index of the current landscape of the Internet…  Google cannot.
• Twitter can provide user generated filtering of Bull poopy where content that is cream of the crop will float to the top.
• Twitter can contain the verbose and force them to stick to a few good points.

I still believe in Twitter, but just like anything else in this world, once it gets popular and gets under the microscope the imperfections get amplified.  The retweet is a gigantic Zit on the Supermodel nose, and there is no Clearasil in sight.

For those of you that don’t know what a “retweet” is;  a retweet is when one person copies a tweet from someone in their Twitter network and shares it with the people in their own network.  For those of you that don’t know what a “Twitter” is; I would really like to understand how you get your cave wired for cable.

In theory the retweet is the definition of “word of mouth” advertising.  The more people share something with others the more relevant or important it becomes.  It makes sense.  However, there is a missing element in 90% of the retweets that I get from people.  Most people don’t add WHY they are retweeting.  A retweet without context is a sandwich without bread.  Non-contextual retweets fall into the “White Noise” category of information.

It’s gotten so bad lately that I have been “de-friending” the habitual retweeters.  In fact, there have been a few folks that only retweet.  In my opinion, a genetically engineered Gerbil could be trained to only retweet.

I understand that Social Media gurus teach this a way to “get the word out”.  I appreciate the sentiment of the idea, and agree that it might be successful in the short term, but in the long run it is absolutely the worst thing to happen to Twitter.

Why is it so bad?

White Noise retweet posts without context will become the “boy who cried wolf” of the internet, and eventually people will just start tuning them out.  This will kill the potential power of the search tool Twitter has at their fingertips.  It will be ruined by the tribes that can assemble enough people to retweet inane posts, and influence the search capabilities.  It is no longer user-generated content, and now becomes user-manipulated content.

How it can be fixed?

Add context for your retweets.  Tell people why you think they are important.  Without context to our retweets, we are nothing more than social media capable genetically engineered gerbils.