Twitter Apps for Business: Overview of software to make your life easier

In a recent article, Mashable reviewed and compared 19 popular Twitter desktop applications. The reviews are informative, but mainly focus on how these applications can benefit individuals who tweet, not businesses. Does this mean that the Twitter apps best suited for individual users are the ones best suited for businesses or organizations? Not necessarily. If your business uses Twitter, here are five business-geared apps that will make your social media life a lot easier:

TweetDeck:

There are a lot of Twitter desktop apps out there. Some of them, like Digsby and Mac Lounge, provide a simple, user-friendly interface appropriate for someone who wants to manage their personal Tweets without having to chain their web browser to twitter.com. But things become more complicated when you have thousands of followers, when you’re following thousands more, and when you need a way to organize your tweets for marketing research.

Enter TweetDeck.

TweetDeck’s most valuable business feature is its ability to organize your tweets into unlimited columns and split people into customized groups. This allows you to add structure to Twitter’s unyielding stream of information, and easily find tweets about specific topics.

TweetDeck also helps you maintain your Twitter account by recommending people to follow, reporting spam, integrating with Facebook, and offering a new iPhone app that syncs with your columns and groups.

The latest version of the application lets you manage multiple accounts. So if you send business tweets off your personal and official company profiles, you can sync the two and view account activity side-by-side.

TweetLater:

TweetLater offers a variety of services that share a single objective: to make Twitter more business-friendly. With the free version, you can track Twitter keywords, schedule posting of future Tweets, send automated welcome messages, and integrate multiple accounts. The combination of these services turns Twitter into a formidable marketing tool that can be used to implement the most strategic of marketing plans.

TweetCloud:

If you’re a business on Twitter, who you follow reflects your brand identity. So you can’t just randomly follow people without knowing the content of their tweets, especially if it can confuse your online image or mislead potential targets.

TweetCloud helps you learn more about what Twitter users actually tweet about. As its name suggests, TweetCloud creates a cloud of a user’s Tweets using keywords. This gives you a broad understanding of a persons’s real tweet content. (@nptechdude might claim he tweets about nonprofit technology, but he really tweets more about his pet Labradoodle.) Now, you can make an informed decision about whether to follow particular users.

Qwitter:

Ever wonder how your followers react to specific tweets? Qwitter gets to the heart of the matter by revealing which tweets cause people to unfollow you. This gives any business great ideas about what not to say to the Twitter community.

Twittergrader:

With all marketing, metrics are important. Social media is no exception. Twittergrader tracks your presence on Twitter though stats, ratios, and graphs, and ranks you based on location, country, and industry. It also lets you track competetors and key influencers. This tool helps you discover new opportunities to increase your reach and boost your Twitter ROI.