There are a number to tools that help you maximize your use of Twitter.

Tools like Hashtags, Ping, Hootsuite, Tweet Later, Twollo, Twitter Local, and Tweet Deck are briefly explained in this video. Give some of them a try.

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A Tool for Twitter (and Facebook)

Huck

TweetDeck is a free application that you can download onto your computer. It monitors your Twitter accounts. It also allows you to post onto Twitter and Facebook.

TweetDeck lets you create all kinds of sorting and filtering that helps maximize your time monitoring what people are Tweeting. Find out when they are talking about you or your company. See what they are saying. And then determine if you need to respond. It may be a sales opportunity, or it could be an opportunity to put out a fire.

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A YouTube Demo

Take a look at this demo from YouTube and think about how you can use it for your business.

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Download TweetDeck

Go to TweetDeck.com and download the software. Then create some lists to follow and make some postings. It won’t take long for you to discover what a powerful tool this is.

Lists Save Time

Twitter provides a list tool that allows you to organize the people you follow. You can place the people in categories and then you are able to choose the categories of tweets you want to see.

Sometimes you want to see tweets related to a particular business topic, other times you may just want to see the tweets of your friends. You can add as many categories as you want.

Here is a great video to learn how to use Twitter lists.

What categories do you divide your tweets into?

Huck Huckabee

Keep Up-To-Date

If you are keeping up-to-date on your social media, then you are running into the same problems we all are. And that is keeping up to date! Everything is changing and changing very quickly. A lot of times we get so caught up in the new elements that we forget to review the basics.

Review The Basics – Tagging

Erin Blaskie has put together some great videos on the basics of Tweeting.

Her Part 2 video is a great one for learning some of the basics. In this video you can also learn how to find someone to follow, learn how to tweet to the world, learn how to send a direct message. And learn more sophisticated procedures like tagging. This is a good review of how to get followers and how to make sure people know when you mention them on Twitter.

This video was created in October 18th. So it is very up to date and does a good job explaining some of the new features of Twitter.

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Need Help Setting Up Your Twitter Account?

If you have not set up a Twitter account and need help setting one up go to Erin’s first video by clicking here.

Twitter Making Major Changes

Over the next couple of days your should begin to see some major changes taking place on Twitter. Titter will add photos and videos to the stream. This will closer approach some of the capabilities that Facebook has.

The rollout is suppose to take a couple of weeks to become fully implemented. But, some locals are expected to start seeing the changes as early as today.

Are your getting the new Twitter yet? What do you think of the change.

Using SMS With Twitter

Twitter now allows you to follow someone on SMS if you don’t have a Twitter account. The tool is called “Fast Follow.” If you text “follow (username)” to Twitter’s shortcut of 40404, then you’ll receive that users updates in your text messaging.

When you are not signed in to Twitter, you can’t Tweet yourself. But some people may just want to receive messages from selected sources. And it may be a good way to send massages to customers and employees quickly and efficiently.

Do you think you will use Fast Follow? If so, how?

Huck

Twitter is implementing a tool that will suggest people for your to follow. The suggestions will be based on people you are following and who they are following. You can find it by going to the “Find People” link in the Twitter header and then click on the “Suggestions For You” tab. There you will find your list of suggestions.

Would You Pay Twitter To Suggest You?

A lot of businesses and individuals would like to get followers. I’m sure some are willing to pay for them. Is this a chance for Twitter to make some money?

A business that sells ballroom dance shoes would like ballroom dancers to receive their tweets. Twitter has the capability to scan tweets and see who tweets about dancing. This is the person that the shoe store would be interested in as having a follower.

Things are not working like this yet, but the opportunity is now close to presenting itself. Sounds like a win for the follower and the followee to me. What do you think?

Here’s what my suggestion screen looks like.

Twitter dangled a piece of cheese in front of some social media professionals recently with a setting called “Tweet Media.” It involves tools that will allow users to embed photos and videos into there Twitter messages.

On some accounts on July 26th, there were account settings options for the user to click that enabled Tweet Media.

Here’s what it looked like:

As of the writing of this article Twitter has removed the options from several of the accounts that temporarily had it. When Mashable Media asked Twitter about the option, they replied:

We’re constantly exploring features and settings. What you saw was a small test of a potential consumption setting for inline media. We show inline media on our own iPhone and Android apps.

Keep an eye out for some significant changes in Twitter’s presentation methods.

Twitter keeps growing and they are adding another service. Today they begin rolling out Twitter Location. Users will be given the option to give some information on their location. How specific will be the call of the Twitterer.

This service is expected to be worked in over the next week. Users in 65 countries will start to see the “Add your location” link below the Tweet box.

For those of you using Foursquare and Gowalla, Twitter has worked with both services to incorporate the location features with those services. And application programmers will be able to integrate the service into their applications. So be on the lookout for some neat apps that will soon be available.