Alice from Wonderland would have loved Twitter.   Tons of rabbit holes in which to fall.  The challenge with Twitter is you can get swept along and forget what you’re doing.  There are so many interesting tweets and links that you have to stay focused.

These seven Twitter tools will help you evaluate your current Twitter activity and help you better listen, monitor and track your social media efforts.  In addition, some of these tools let you graph your tweets for trending purposes and others let you look your followers and data on their patterns.

Addict-o-matic is a nifty little tool that creates an instant webpage collection of results from Twitter, Yahoo Search, Bing, Google, Tweetmeme, Flickr, and 20+ more.  You then save your search as a bookmark and can get back to it any time you like and see the latest real-time results.  An RSS feed option is coming soon.  You can drag and drop your results into an order that makes sense to you.  They have a hip robot logo, too.

If you look at the variety of results, you can quickly see who is talking, what they are saying and it will give you ideas for who else to follow, terms that are related to your own.  Again, this is a simple collection tool that lets you monitor many sources at once.

Trackur:  Lisa Barone did a review of Trackur here in March.  You enter keywords and use advanced filters to get to just the term you want to monitor.  The tool also measures sentiment, whether a comment or tweet or post is positive, negative, or neutral.  They measure and rank influence as well, a growing area of interest. They have a free plan for one saved search and an affordable plan for small businesses that want to track their social media and brand reputation. Read Lisa’s review for more ideas.

Klout:  Part of tracking impact is determining if your trust and influence are increasing and Klout helps you figure that out.  Influence is a derived metric so you have to be careful with relying on it to prove anything to yourself, your peers, or your boss.  The Klout Score is a numerical representation of the size and strength of a person’s sphere of influence on Twitter. Over 25 variables in three categories are analyzed:  True Reach, Amplification, and Network.  For example, the size of your sphere is calculated by measuring True Reach (engaged followers and friends vs. spam bots, dead accounts, etc.).  You can look at your own score and anyone else on Twitter.

Optify:  Offers a robust Twitter for Business Management tool, with a free version that will appeal to many small businesses.   They let you set up real-time alerts to track specific keywords, but then they also let you three things that I think are cool:  One, you can score your leads and web traffic.  Two, you can organize your tweets into campaigns so you can see what focused efforts are working, or not.   Three, you can optimize your website from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective.  You can also schedule tweets and campaigns in advance, which is useful. (Full disclosure:  I’ve done some webinar project work for this company.)

Social Oomph:  I’ve been using this tool to manage tweets in advance.  For those of you who would rather block out chunks of time for Twitter, you can use this free service to schedule and manage Twitter accounts.  You can also assign access to others from this dashboard, too.  I can monitor keywords, vet followers, send auto DMs to key people in my network.  I want to comment on auto DMs are easily viewed as spam, so use this carefully and wisely.  The service itself puts extra controls on this feature.  For keywords and terms you’re monitoring, they will automatically send you a report once or twice a day.

CoTweet:  This Twitter Management tool is very helpful for teams that manage a range of accounts or have very busy main accounts.  You can have multiple accounts with multiple users.  One of the great things about CoTweet is that you can see the conversation that takes place between your users and the Twitterverse.  They offer keyword and trend monitoring, too.

Alterian SM2:  This service is packed with features.  I was blown away by all the different ways to slice and view the data in their interactive dashboard.  You search on selected keywords and can see reports on daily volume for that term, share of voice (meaning blogs, microblogs, photo sharing sites, etc), basic demographics of the users posting on that topic (gender, age).   You can click and see the results for sentiment in the same dashboard.

Many people already track keywords and hashtags with mainstream Twitter clients like Hootsuite, Seesmic, and Tweetdeck.  I’m a fan of Tweetdeck, but have been trying out Hootsuite, as well.   These seven tools give a new twist to managing Twitter.  There are many more tools out there, for sure, but this post should give you a few new ones to check out.

From Small Business Trends

7 Twitter for Business Tools for Monitoring, Listening, and Tracking

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