Twitter is one of those social marketing tools that lots of people are promoting and recently there has been a lot of traffic of IMers creating their Twitter profiles and urging everyone to follow them. I am still investigating the use of this and wondering how it is effective for marketing. Twitter has been called a micro blog and it allows an one line post with limited characters to tell your “followers” what you are up to. You can add links to this, which is useful if you want to announce a new blog post or highlight a new url.
I have set up an account at www.twitter.com, followed a few people and am trying to post some useful comments. Have no conclusions on this so far. It just seems like a lot of people telling you about them getting on planes, washing their cars, etc.
In the meantime, a lot of tools have been developed around the Twitterers and I have listed the top 5 tools for Twitter below.
www.Twhirl.org
This is a desktop application that lets you read tweets and post from your desktop. It integrates Tweetscan and also enables cross posting to Jaiku and Pownce.
www.Tweetfeed.com
This auto tweets whenever you post to your blog by subscribing to your blog’s RSS feed.
www.Tweetscan.com
This lets you search the world of twitter for new tweets on any phrase – your name, your company, product, etc. Then it lets you subscribe to an RSS feed of that search.
www.hellotxt.com
This is a new beta service that aggregates your micro blogging activities and sends your tweets to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. Saves you having to post to all those separately.
www.FriendFeed.com
FriendFeed is very new and it looks like quite a novel idea. It pulls in feeds from any site that you have and it will show it all in one interface. It can pick up new Youtube videos that your friends recommend, new photos they have posted on flickr, new posts on their blogs, etc. No installation required but you can subscribe by RSS feed or download their facebook application. Seems quite versatile. Will definitely investigate this one further.
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