A quick search on for ‘twit­ter tools’ your favorite search engine will reveal that there are as many third-party Twit­ter over­lay tools as there are grains of sand on the earth. Which ones are use­ful? Which ones are junk? The answers depend in part on the author of the tool but largely depend upon your inten­tion for your Twit­ter account.

If you use Twit­ter to just com­mu­ni­cate with fam­ily and friends then you most likely won’t ever need to use any sort of Twit­ter tools.  Most of these third-party tools are for tweet­ers that wish to tweet often, in recur­rence or some other ‘mass-produce’ fashion.

Per­son­ally, I find that the most use­ful Twit­ter tools are ‘tweet sched­ulers’.  To me, it is no more dif­fer­ent than sched­ul­ing a blog post to pub­lish in the future. That isn’t to say that I have orphaned my Twit­ter account but there are a cer­tain amount of tweets that I can eas­ily pre­dict a week or so into the future.  Sched­ul­ing some of my tweets a week out takes a big respon­si­bil­ity off of my shoul­ders and frees me up to do other things like writ­ing a blog or article.

I have listed some excel­lent Twit­ter tools below for you to con­sider. Happy Tweeting!

• Twit­pay: An excel­lent way to send pay­ments using twitter
• Twibs: Use Twibs to find and fol­low busi­nesses on twitter
• Twit­ter­mail: Post to your twit­ter account by using a unique email address from Twittermail
• Twuf­fer: Use Twuf­fer to sched­ule your tweets in the future.