PCMike’s favorite Twitter Tools

Forget e-mail, forget websites and blogs.

These days, social networking is all the rage and the one craze that everyone is talking about is Twitter, which uses short 140-character postings to alert friends, family and followers to what’s happening in your world. Millions join every month and there are lots of tools to help you Twitter better.

Not sure how Twitter works? Start out on Twitter.com where you can get a free account. Then head to the official Twitter blog, where there’s a list of frequently asked questions and answers.

First thing is to get some followers. There are lots of ways. Some great, some questionable… like mass following total strangers. One of the best systems I’ve found is a $27 instructional series that uses free tools to carefully target people to follow – and follow you – because of shared interests. How many followers can you get? The creator says 16,000 in 90 days. For more info, click here.

Here’s another very handy Twitter helper: Tweet Later. The free version helps you track replies, unfollow those who unfollow you, send automatic message to to new followers and even schedule your tweets, or the 140-word messages you send.

The Retweetist site gives you a list of the most poplar tweets on the Net.
Twitpic lets you send photos.

Tweetburner lets you shorten the URL addresses of interesting webpages you want to tell your followers about.

Twitscoop lets you search topics, keywords or people to see what’s being posted in realtime.

And Twitter Background Gallery lets you customize the look of your Twitter page… like my PC Mike presence on Twitter.

Okay PCMike.com readers… Here are some extra Twitter Tools that I didn’t have time to showcase in the NBC-TV PCMike video:

Probably my favorite Twitter tool these days is Hootsuite, which calls itself the ultimate Twitter toolbox.” With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success. You can use multiple accounts, tweet across all of them or selected ones. And it’s makes it easy for your followers to re-tweet you, too.

Twits Near Me shows recent tweets from people near you. is another one that lets you search not just by location but proximity and keywords.

Twitter Vision shows you, on a map, and in 3D View if you want, live tweets from all over the world. It’s addictive.

If that intrigues you, download Tweetdeck. It’s meant to sit on your desktop and show contstant updates.

Wondering how you stack up as a Twitter user? Check out the Twitter Grader. It ranks you according to popularity and how you’re trending out there in the Twitterverse.

To see the top twitter users, and to add yourself and the keyword categories you tweet about to a growing Twitter directory, visit We Follow.

As Twitter keeps growing in popularity, so do Twitter applications. As I write this, 601 are in the database at Twitdom, which categorizes and lists them all.

Finally, looking for ways to use Twitter? There’s a good guide on ProBlogger.

Got some cool Twitter apps of your own? Suggest them under comments below.

And be sure to follow me, too. On Twitter. I’m PCMike