Keeping track of Twitter can be a full-time job. Fortunately, there are a handful of tools that you can use to automate and organise much of your Twitter-based communications.

None of these tools require passwords, merely your username. This means that you can use them for competitor research or just to see who seems to be doing what right.

• Twist: It allows you to spot trends in the collective Twitter stream, which you can then harness for the business.
• Twitt(url)y: If you are into Twitter trends, this is a great tool to see what people are talking about and how far a link can spread. It also calculates the estimated reach of a tweet.
• TweetEffect: You can determine which tweets are popular and how your tweeting behaviour affects your followers.
• Twitalyzer:

1. It allows you to determine what aspects of your Twitter stream is lacking, with each element guiding you towards good Twitter practice.
2. The signal-to-noise ration points out if you are just throwing statements out in the Twittersphere or if you are providing your followers with useful information.

• Twitter Grader:

1. It takes all the elements that Twitalyzer considers and calculates one overall grade.
2. This grade can be useful when you have to summarise the success of a company profile in a single statistic.
3. If you want to evaluate your personal profile it is interesting to see where you rank and what your grade is.

TweetStats: If you manage multiple company profiles, graphs can be useful when reporting on the progress of those profiles. It analyses your Twitter stream and tells you the density of your daily tweets, your aggregated hourly and daily tweets, who retweets you, who you retweet and the interface used.

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Other Twitter-related articles:

Getting the most out of your Twitter | Market your web site with Twitter | What social media can do for your web site