So your on twitter and you wonder what about all the gadgets offered by companies that help you twitter. There are many and I have tried a few with varying degrees of success. I offer the following because it’s what I know from personal use. I do not endorse any of them and I have no affiliation with any of them.

TweetLater:(free with paid upgrade available) has a couple of free tools that allow you to automate some of your Twitter tasks. You can schedule a retweet, or a twit for later in the day. You can also vet your new followers with an automated welcome message. It can also look at your new followers and sort them into accept, ignore, block or spam which can be helpful. Twitter booted a bunch of people who were using Tweetlater saying that, that was not the reason why they got booted. Those counts were all reinstated however except for the spammer ones I suspect.

True Twit: (free) This filter sends a message asking that the person on the other end respond and verify they are a real person. This is common in email practices and spam programs and now there is one for twitter. I used it and it was a very good functional tool. However, I did have one person contact twitter and claim that I was spamming her. She did not know of this program apparently and was not able to google it before sending the automated response to twitter. I tried to apologize but then this person also blocked me so maybe she was spam?

Twitter adder: (free trial then paid program) I tried this program and it is a program. It will download and allow you to do a few tasks up to a point when you will have to purchase it to continue. You can use this to bulk add people, or delete them etc. You can add followers of people you already follow, and also delete others that don’t follow you back. While the program worked fine, it seems to detach you from the whole process and part of twitter and adding and following people is being involved I thought? no? How can you engage new followers politely and correctly otherwise?

Tweet deck (free iphone and desktop) I use tweetdeck on my iphone and like the interface and its quick add feature. I also like being able to search columns etc. This is a very good free application. It is available on itunes.

I used the tweetdeck beta on my Mac desktop and while it was very good it caused my Mac pro-book to overheat so I stopped using it. I heard it was API related (not sure hwta that is ) but when I took it off my pro-book problem was solved. I have heard there has since been an update but I am all set thanks.

Seesmic Desktop: ( free desktop MAC) I use this program on my laptop now and love it. In addition to all the twitter functionality you can also post on facebook which is nice also. You just have to remember where you are posting if that matters to you.

Co-tweet: (free) I tried it but found that it is more geared to large companies that have multiple twitter accounts and its more about maintaining presence then just tweeting as a small business owner and Producer. Maybe it’s something to re-investigate when my company is much bigger.

Sites and companies mentioned.

http://www.tweetlater.com/
http://tweetadder.com/
http://tweetdeck.com/beta/
http://cotweet.com/
http://seesmic.com/