Three Tools To Analyze And Manage Your Twitter Usage

There are masses of Twitter related applications. More than any other social media service you can analyze trends and statistics about your own and other users’ profile. I’m not Twitter power user, but I have a solid profile and find the service really useful. I’ve tried many different Twitter tools over time. Right now I have three favorites.

Twubble

I’m not a big fan of #followfriday, because it’s just lists of “people to follow” without context. My preferred tool for finding new people to follow is Twubble. It’s a simple tool; it will search through people you’re following and give you a list of suggested links based on who they’re following. I check out the site at least once a week.

Why I Like It

I like to be able to make a quick judgement of who I want to check out further from a suggestion list. Twubble gives me three important pieces of information:

• Profile picture
• Link to their Twitter profile
• Which of my friends follow them

I can make a good judgement based on those factors. I’ll check out their Twitter profile and posts, and their blog/website, but the gut feeling from the Twubble list is usually right. It’s also useful that Twubble keeps its list manageable and expandable.

TwitterCounter

The best analytics tool I’ve found for measuring raw data. The site tracks your follower growth over time, details the average growth of your followers and gives overall Twitter ranking as well as geographical options. It provides raw data and graphical representations, future predictions based on past statistics and allows you to compare statistics between any two Twitter users.

Why I Like It

TwitterCounter gives me the most useful overview of the general trends of my account. I love the prediction tool, flexible enough so that you can predict follower numbers at any point in the future. For those who have more than one Twitter account then the comparison tool can give you a handy overview of the differences between the two.

Tweepular

Tweepular’s over the top color scheme hides a solid management suite. It tracks your following/followers and allows bulk management of these users. You can see reciprocal follows and one way follows, and sort and manage your account in various ways. It also ranks you based on your “Tweepularity”. That’s a good idea but  it would help if we had at least some hint as to what factors its measuring or there’s no way to judge what Tweepularity actually means.

Why I Like It

The color scheme is kinda fun, but it’s the functionality that’s attractive. Bulk follow/unfollow is invaluable. It’s also helpful to be able to sort out people you’re following who don’t tweet any more (you can sift by date of last tweet). Unlike many web based Twitter services you don’t have to proceed to someone’s Twitter profile to get more information – a mouseover of a user in Tweepular will give you their username, screenname, location, bio and latest tweet. With the promised addition of adding “recent unfollows” to the statistics Tweepular is a serious piece of kit, even if it looks a little crazy.