Top 10 Twitter tools for business

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TwInBox lets users directly update their Twitter account from Outlook as well as receive friend's updates. It also pulls in tweets, so that you can group and search for tweets in the same way that you use your email.

This video shows more details about it works - and highlights the added benefit that TwInBox lets you tweet at work while looking like you're hard at work in Outlook.

Twitterhawk

For really serious business users with intentions of marketing through Twitter, this is the tool to use.

It works by monitoring Twitter posts for keywords and sending automated replies to users when the words pop up.

Depending on your needs, you can have either confirm messages before they're sent, or let their system take care of it all and automatically send replies when it finds a match.

It’s not free though – after a certain amount of free tweets the service requires you to pay for the tweets that you want send out.

Twitterhawk is very careful to not spam – it will investigate anyone who uses its service thought to be spammers. For every auto reply setup (a maximum of six), it will send out one tweet every two hours at the most.

Twitt(url)ly

It pays for a business user to know what the most popular trends are on Twitter.

But the top ten trends you find on the Twitter homepage is a basic rating and taken over by trends that you may not be particularly interested in - especially if you’re looking for business topics.

Twitt(url)ly tracks trends in much more depth than Twitter’s own system.

It works by tracking and ranking URLs shared on Twitter by popularity. This means that by looking at the list, it is possible to see what trends, reports and products are popular, as well as uncover people are thinking.

Cligs

This is for businesses that are looking to understand their traffic better. Analytics are also offered with Hootsuite and Cotweet, but this tool has much more in-depth information about all aspects of the tweets that your visitors are saying about you.

It works by allowing to you to shorten the URL of the web page link you want to tweet, and track in real-time what is happening to it.

You can find out if anybody is looking at what you post, what messages are working best marketing wise, and who is clicking on your links.

Tweetie

The new wave of smartphones allows both businesses and consumers to tweet on the move. This app is for iPhone, and offers the functionality of a tool like Tweetdeck on the move.

However, iPhone users are required to pay a small charge for the functionality, but for the fee you get an iPhone style look and feel as well as the ability to use multiple accounts. For a less shiny app you also have choices like Twitterfon and the mobile version of Tweetdeck.

If a you are a business user with a BlackBerry, there are Twitter apps such as TwitterBerry that you can use. Other phones may their own Twitter clients that you can look up through a quick Google search.

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