Best Twitter Apps For Marketers (And How to Use Them Cleverly)

September 15th, 2009 by admin

As a Marketer, you need to know everything about your target audience that will give you the insights necessary to make you effective in solving their problems, fulfilling their desires and giving them what they really wanted (and even giving them what they didn’t know they wanted).

As technology advances, marketers now have tools and applications that help create a marketing intelligence using convenient, quick, inexpensive and easily accessible methodologies.

Below is a compilation of the best Twitter Apps for Marketers and how to use them creatively to connect with your target crowd.

Best Twitter Directories and User Search Tools

You can’t sell to your potential customers if you don’t know where they are, who they are or what they’re really thinking. Find your target market segments and engage with them using Twitter Directories and User Search Tools.

Twellow and JustTweetIt
Directories categorizing tweeple by interests and occupation.

TwellowHood
Twellow’s local tweeple finder. Great if your target market is geographically-limited.

Twittie Me
Search for users that fit your criteria, then Post your Twitter profile and use mind control tricks to get them to follow you.

Twitdir
Search for words (that describe your target audience – e.g., “virtual assistant”, “alcoholic”, “single parent”) in names, usernames, locations and/or descriptions, then stalk follow them.

Once you’ve found them, monitor their tweets and find out their hot buttons – so you’ll know which ones to press to elicit a purchase.

Twitter Apps for Asking Questions

Find out what makes your target audience tick. What keeps them up at night? What ticks them off? What are they struggling with? What problems do they have that you may be able to solve for them? The answers are all there – if you know where to look for and how to really listen.

Lazy Tweet
Engage your target audience by posting your marketing-related (but user-oriented) questions to “@lazyweb” or “@lazytweet”. Put the other way around, you can answer questions from tweeple about your business/product/expertise!

Twitter Answers
Follow QNA then send a DM to ask a question. Make sure to watch out for questions about your product/industry/topic of expertise. Answering them could help establish you as a Market Leader in your Tribe.

Cool Twitter Tools for Conducting Polls.

Marketing Research has never been this easy!

Straw Poll
Create and answer polls. Find out what your target audience think.

Twitter Polldaddy
Create a poll and send it to your followers. Easy peasy!

Twittpoll
Join relevant twitter polls. After 24 hours you’ll receive the results in your Twitter account.

Get a Customized Twitter Background for your Profile.

Stand Out

Twitter is a useful tool for brand-building, so make sure your Twitter background communicates your image and makes you stand out.

Twitter Backgrounds
Get a Professionally made, 100% unique Twitter Background in 3 business days or less for only $99.

EasiSell.com
On a tight budget? Get a Professionally made, 100% unique Twitter Background for $77 from @ClementYeung of EasiSell.com. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back

Twitter Patterns and Tweet Backs

On a non-existent budget? Get Free Do-It-Yourself Twitter Backgrounds and design patterns from these sites.

Make Sure You’ve Got Your Hand on The Pulse of Your Target Market!

TwitScoop
Find out what’s hot – in real time.

Twitter Search
Search for the latest trends on Twitter.

Tweetmeme

Know the hottest links on Twitter, gain insights as to WHY, and work on how you too can make your link viral.

GeoChirp

If your target market is geo-specific, GeoChirp lets you track your chosen keywords/phrases being tweeted in specific geographical areas. For example, if you’re a real estate agent in London, you may want to search for people tweeting about “house” or “property” in the relevant map area. Go easy on the sales pitch.

Best Twitter Apps to Monitor Your Brand

Can you imagine being able to eavesdrop every time there’s a conversation about you, your company/business, your products, or about the latest screw ups of your competitors?

Well, now you can.

Use the following Twitter Apps to monitor your brand, company name, product, or what people are saying about a relevant keyword. Perfect for getting valuable customer feedback.

Tweet Beep

Alerts you whenever someone talks about you or your chosen keywords. Remember to keep your cool if someone slags you off.

Site volume and Tweet Volume

Lets you monitor the popularity of your chosen word or phrase in Digg, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr and Twitter.

Monitter

Monitor Twitter conversations in real time. Perfect if you’re looking for something in particular and you want info now.

LouderVoice

Read reviews of your products or your competitor’s products.

People generally express exactly what’s on their mind in Twitter. If you find them bitching and moaning about say, how bad your company’s customer service is, you can at least address it and rectify it – before your reputation gets damaged.

On the other hand if nobody is talking about you, you know it’s time to get people buzzing about your product/service!

Great Twitter Apps to Build Your Following

Twitter tools that help targeted relationship-building and boost the number of your followers.

Hummingbird Twitter Pro Tool
Build a targeted, responsive, and continually growing number of followers within a short time.

AutoPilot Tweet
Comprehensive Twitter Marketing Software for $39.99

My List Strategy
Automatically Extracts Leads & Traffic From Sites You Don’t Own

Find Twitter too Time-Consuming? Automate Some of Your Tweets

TwitterFeed
Set up RSS Feeds of relevant blogs (i.e., your business blog) to automatically tweet updates on your Twitter account. This will automatically notify your followers every time you publish a new blog post.

Social Oomph
Schedule recurring tweets, auto-follow those who follow you, send auto-DMs to new followers,and you can even outsource the management of your Twitter account to your Virtual Assistant.

Twit Response
Having a product launch, upcoming seminar, book release? Setup a scheduled tweet to automatically notify your followers.