Free Twitter Tools to Help Speed up the Process

In our last post we talked about how to build a targeted Twitter following for free. This post will demonstrate two popular tools that can help speed up the process we outlined. There are a ton of ton of tools out there but we're going to talk about Tweetdeck and manageflitter.com.

One of the things I love most about this system of finding followers is that you can do it in 5 minute chunks. I wish everything was so easy to fit into your daily routine! Tweetdeck helps speed the process up even more by showing you all of your different "target streams" on one page. If you have 5 different terms that you look for new followers from, you can make a column for each 5 so they're always in front of you. When you log on you can check for any tweets involving you or your friends, and then scroll over to your searches to find and follow some new potential followers.

Tweetdeck is handy, but manageflitter.com is a necessity. As we explained in our last post, un-following people has nothing to do with trying to maintain an "impressive ratio", it's about keeping your following/follower ratio close enough for Twitter to allow you to follow new people. If you let it build up then you'll hit a point where you have 800 or more people you need to un-follow. That will take some long sessions and completely defeats the purpose of using this method.

If you're using a different twitter client or bulk twitter un-follow tool and you like it by all means stick with it. I choose these two because they were free, easy to use and very popular.

In our next post we're going to talk about using RSS to automatically stream content from your blog to Twitter and some thoughts about interacting with your followers.