Highly Effective Twitter Tools

We like Twitter. And tools. What do we use to maintain our social media presence?

CoTweet

CoTweet is a website UI for Twitter that applies the email concept to Twitter messages. When you get a new mention or direct message on Twitter, you get a message in your CoTweet inbox, and you can choose to have an email notification sent to you email address. You can also schedule tweets, keep an archive of sent and received messages, and set up saved searches. Once you’ve dealt with a message in your inbox (or decided to ignore it) you can file it as read.

Where CoTweet really shines is in collaboration. Multiple people can have access to the same Twitter accounts, and users can be assigned as “on duty”, meaning that person gets an email notification when a mention or direct message comes in. The other powerful feature of CoTweet is the ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts from the same interface. When you send out a message, you can choose which Twitter account to send from.

CoTweet does not have a mobile version (yet), so you’ll still need a mobile Twitter client if you want to stay connected while you’re on the move. My personal choice is Tweetie for the iPhone.

CoTweet is currently free. Here’s the info on their sign-up page: “CoTweet is currently free to use, so have at it! We’ll give you plenty of notice before we start charging for the service, and the cost will be reasonable.” I would personally be willing to pay $20/month for CoTweet. I use it for Wizkid Sound (@wizkidsound), my personal Twitter account (@rdyson), and the WeTheCitizens Twitter account (@wethecitizens).

Ping.fm

Ping.fm’s slogan is: “Ping.fm is a simple and free service that makes updating your social networks a snap!” And they’re not kidding. Enter your account information for all your social networking accounts (they have every social network I’ve ever heard of) and you’re ready to broadcast messages. The main networks we push to with Ping.fm are Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Identi.ca. Features include automatic link shortening with statistics, the ability to post to specific networks or all networks, and post history. You can also create custom groups of networks to post to.

Another awesome feature of Ping.fm is picture posting. Attach a photo to an email, send it to your private Ping.fm email address, and Ping will publish a link to the photo on their media sharing service. You can also have photos automatically posted to Flickr and Facebook.

So, how do you post to Ping.fm apart from email? Any way you want. At Wizkid Sound we generally use their website, their iPhone formatted website, and email. But you can also post via SMS, IM, a browser toolbar, or by voice using SpinVox (call a number and say your message).

Ping.fm has great support too. A couple of times I’ve asked questions on Twitter about issues or features and have received a response within a couple of hours.

If you’ve got a message to blast out and you’re not afraid of being a new media douchebag, Ping.fm is perfect.

Peashoot

We’ve been trying out Peashoot, whose slogan is “The quick & easy way to manage social media campaigns that sell.” We’re not really ’selling’ anything online, just trying to gain exposure and make connections. We have found Peashoot very helpful since we started blogging regularly though. Peashoot lets you set up “campaigns”, which have a goal of x number of Twitter clicks. They also have their own link-shortening service which provides analytics data and allows you to customize the link URL. For example, we have a short URL for the main Wizkid Sound site which is http://pea.to/wiz. And because Peashoot is a relatively new service a lot of the short URLs are still available. You can also use your own website domain for short URLs.

Peashoot provides realtime stats on who’s clicking your links. The data updates every few seconds (5-8 seconds as far as I can tell) and shows a map of clicks based on users’ IP address locations.

Besides conversion tracking, there are a few other features that look awesome. By integrating with Google Analytics, Peashoot can give you ROI information. The Audience Builder feature is fantastic – it automatically follows Twitter users based on criteria you set, for example, keywords they are using.

One interesting thing we discovered about Peashoot is there are a number of sites that seem to spider all links you post on Twitter. Within seconds of posting a Peashoot link, we get at least 10 “clicks”. When we compare click data to our Google Analytics visitor data, the ‘clicks’ number is significantly higher than the number of visits. Still handy and interesting to see where all the clicks are coming from, even if it is a robot reading our blog. One thing I should mention is that you can use the Peashoot links anywhere, you’re not restricted to just Twitter use.

Peashoot is not free, it’s $17/month for a regular account and $25/month for a pro account, and offer a free trial for both. I’d consider Peashoot well worth the price if we were looking at conversion rates and ROI, and I’m considering buying a subscription just for the non-conversion features. If you’re not concerned with conversions, you might find that a link-shortening service with statistics like Bit.ly would suit your needs. Peashoot is developed by Egg Co., who also develop Sweetcron, which we use on our homepage for our aggregated feed.

In Conclusion…

We use CoTweet, Ping.fm, and Peashoot several times a day, every day. They work for us, but there are tons of other tools out there that will work too. What do you use for your Twitter communication?