There are lots of applications available to use for Twitter, and chances are you’ve seen quite a few of them.

There are some that are made just to be fun, and others that have the purpose of being helpful in some way. Some Twitter applications are designed to make things simpler for bloggers while others are geared towards business owners and entrepreneurs.

If you are using Twitter for social media marketing, which most of you probably are, you’re going to need to keep up with whom you’re following and who’s following. This set of tools will help you to get the most out of your Twitter experience.

Tweetdeck – This application lets you tweet from your desktop. You can segment the people you follow into different streams, thus allowing you to juggle multiple conversations at once. You can also create global search categories which could be useful if you’re looking for new people to follow.

TweetGrid – This application makes it easy to manage multiple Twitter accounts. You can also keep track of multiple global searches at one time. This application will increase your efficiency, and allow you to get more done.

Twitter Grader – Twitter Grader assigns users that you run through the system a grade of 1 to 100. This will allow you to see who is engaged in your conversations and who isn’t, thus you can decide who you want to keep following.

Twinfluence – Twinfluence helps to measure any Twitter user’s influence. If you’re following some people that don’t carry a lot of weight, this tool will help you to weed them out so you can stop following them. This is useful if you send out retweets; you want to make sure that your retweets by other people are getting read.

Tweetcloud – This tool will allow you to investigate what any particular Twitter user likes to talk about. If someone likes to talk about a topic that you have no interest in or that is unrelated to your own niche, then there’s no need to follow them.

Twitter Karma – Twitter Karma lets you sort through everyone you are following to see who’s not following you back. This app shows you mutual follow relationships, and will allow you to unfollow those who aren’t following you back.

Qwitter – Qwitter will keep you updated via email about anyone who stops following you. One of the great things about this little app is that it will even tell you which of your tweets caused the person to stop following you. This could be very useful to help you determine which subjects not to tweet about for the purpose of retaining followers.

Nest.Unclutterer – This tool automatically blocks Twitter users who are following more than a set number of people and it also weeds out those who are inactive for a set amount of days. Not only are you able to set the limits that you choose, but you can also white list certain tweeps so that they can’t be blocked. Nest.Unclutterer will help you to make sure the people who are following you are people that you want to be following you.

Twitscoop – This tool lets you track popular topics on Twitter. Twitscoop is useful for trying to determine what people are interested in at any given time. It also allows you to see what’s being said about particular search terms.

TweetLater – If you’re particularly busy, or you just already know what you’re going to tweet about, you can schedule your tweets ahead of time. This is a definite must for anyone who’s using Twitter as a marketing tool. You can schedule tweets for the times that people are most active and get the most exposure for your messages.

If I have missed any out…let me know in your comments

Take Care,

Michael Silvester