Twitter Toolbox

Once you have established your social media outposts, the next question becomes how to keep

them updated and attracting new visitors.
This simple guide will introduce you to some new tools (that are all free!) to make updating your Twitter accounts as quick and easy as possible.

Twitter  in Plain English

TwitterFeed – http://www.twitterfeed.com

Twitterfeed provides an automated way of posting

information to your Twitter account. Typically this site is used to link to a new blog post, or

headlines from a site. Once you’ve signed up for a Twitterfeed account you input any RSS feed

and it will begin posting all new content into your Twitter stream for you.

Twitterfeed may seem like a “set it and forget it” tool, but there’s no alternative to personal,

manual tweets.

TweetBurner – http://www.tweetburner.com – TweetBurner can work in conjunction with

Twitterfeed to provide stats and information about how many people are clicking on or spreading

the links you post to Twitter.

The service is often used to make URLs shorter (very important when you only have 140

characters to convey your message). The service can also tell you who is “reTweeting” your post

in their own Twitter timeline and giving you more visibility.

Search.Twitter.com – http://search.twitter.com – Twitter (the company) recently purchased

Summize, a Web site that collected ALL tweets (Twitter messages) and made them searchable.

Summize then became search.Twitter.com and it is now one of most useful and important tools

in your Twitter toolbox.

Twitter Search lets you search for all tweets that contain a set of keywords. So if you wanted to

know what people were saying about your station you might search for your call letters, a host or

program name. Search then shows you a list of all of those messages, lets you reply to the author,

and tells you when new tweets come through the system.

The service also provides an RSS feed of the search results so you can add it to your feed reader

and not have to visit the site directly to see the results. (If you’re a little more advanced you

could also create a widget and put it on your own Web site, a “What people are saying…” type

of feature.)

Matt (Multi Account Twitter Tweeter) – http://www.themattinator.com – This is a new service

that allows you to post to multiple Twitter accounts from the same page. (Cool note: It was built

by 10 people in 4 days just to see if it was possible to build a Web application that quickly.)

Matt can be a little buggy and quirky sometimes — it was built in 4 days, after all. But if you

have multiple Twitter accounts – for instance if your station has a primary account and some of

your shows or personalities have their own – you can post to all of them without logging in and

out of Twitter constantly.

Tweetbeep – http://www.tweetbeep.com – Google Alerts for Twitter! Tweetbeep will e-mail

you hourly, or daily with all of the Tweets that mention your chosen keywords. For instance you

could create an alert for your station call letters and whenever you get mentioned anywhere on

Twitter, you’ll know who it was and what they said. This is a great way to connect and help

viewers.