My Top 3 Twitter Tools

I've been using Twitter since pretty early on (and long before @oprah), and I've found it to be a superbly convenient communication tool and notification service. Even though it's still very young on the web (Twitter was founded in March of 2006) It's been the home to great ideas like the #twitterdata proposal and the publicdomain book-via-tweets project. It's also an awesome reputation management platform, and can be used to both to provide effective customer service and help distribute news and updates about your business or product, which is exactly how I use it for my online roleplaying project.

But as with the rest of the social media world, Twitter can become very complex very quickly (but I still contend that there is no social media overload) and as a result, can be difficult to manage. As a result, I use several third-party tools to help me manage and gather information that helps me do my Twitter job much more efficiently and effectively.

Splitweet
[caption id="attachment_196" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Splitweet allows you to post and monitor multiple Twitter accounts and brands."][/caption]

For those of us with multiple Twitter accounts (like some people who create a Twitter account for each roleplaying character they use), Splitweet is an absolute savior. This service allows you to tweet to multiple accounts at the same time, as well as combining the "stream" from each account into one page. A lot of desktop Twitter clients offer this kind of functionality, but where Splitweet truly excels is in its ability to track what it calls "brands" (more reputation management terms here): you can specify keywords and phrases that will appear in a separate feed, even if you do not follow those users. This gets us around the disastrous changes Twitter made to the @replies, and helps us keep up to date on any mentions of our site's name and any tweets relating to what it is that we do.

Sherflock
[caption id="attachment_195" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Sherflock provides detailed statistics and summaries of Twitter users you are associated with."][/caption]

Sherflock is an absolutely awesome stat tracking machine that helps weed out the waves of spam that have been coming in since Twitter has gone mainstream. Sherflock gives a large number of statistics about each every account the either follows you or that you are following, and lets you sort and filter users based on these statistics.

Twitterfall
[caption id="attachment_194" align="alignnone" width="217" caption="Twitterfall offers a live stream of twitter updates on keywords that you specify."][/caption]

This tool allows you to specify any number of keywords that you wish to view on a live, moving stream of tweets. This is very useful if you are using a computer that allows you to "pin" a window on top (like Ubuntu Linux), or if you have a multiple-monitor rig, or even if you use multiple computers using the input-sharing app Synergy. You'll get a live feed of updates on any topic of your choice, which can even be updated and changed in real-time.

Using these three tools will help you maximize you Twitter performance and make the most of an already awesome service, preventing you from being inundated with the massive stream of messages that you're surely going to subscribe to.

What are your top three Twitter tools? Feel free to make a comment or write your own post, and I'll gladly append a link to this post to help everyone out!