Since the last Tips for …. blog, we have found and started to use a few further Twitter tools and applications that further enhance the Twitter experience.

Recently, Harley Grove attended a local meeting of other Twitter users (“tweeple”). The meeting was very useful in that it meant that the users met face-to-face and exchanged ideas and tips of how they use Twitter. Harley Grove have been looking into finding and setting up similar meetings (“tweetups”) and events and came across Twtvite, which is a great event management tool to use with Twitter. You are able to locate tweetups or create your own, show a map of its location, add to your calendar, manage waiting lists if event full etc…

Twitter is great and one of the great things about it is that you are restricted to 140 characters so you have to get your message across in a clear and concise way. However, there are times when you would like to send longer messages and don’t want to be tied down to the 140 characters such as when you need to provide customer support. This is where twtlong comes into its own as it allows longer tweets and creates a “bridge” between the normal tweets and a blog; sort of a “midi-blog”. You are also able to add photos, videos etc…

Need to let everyone know about Special Offers that you are currently running ? Give twtQpon a try as it enables you to produce money-off coupons to distribute via Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. We are about to use it to promote special discounts against some of our services.

When Harley Grove was having its website re-designed, we thought we would ask other tweeple for their feedback on how they thought it was looking. So… we used twtpoll to ask them and we collated the answers using this very useful Twitter application that allows you to create simple online polls to use with Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.

Harley Grove have now updated their status quite a bit and, although we haven’t got loads of Followers and don’t Follow many other tweeple, it would be a real pain to have to set it all up again and impossible to remember what we tweeted about some time ago. So…we looked into being able to take a backup of all of our Followers, people that we Follow and all of the tweets that we have created. Tweetake covers all of this and makes sure that you have this backup of your Twitter experience. However, it only currently takes care of those users with less than 1000 followers so use Twittersafe if you have more than 1000 followers.

Twitter is great for direct messaging (DM) to and from your Twitter Followers and that your DMs are sent to you by email. Yes, this is great, but when you want to reply to these DMs when you have been notified by email messages, it’s a real pain because you then have to go into your Twitter client and then reply from there. Well, not any more as you can now use Topify to reply via email. This saves loads of time and although you need to sign up for a free Topify email address, we have found this very useful.

Anyway, we hope that we have given you some more useful ideas and we hope that these tips  will help you gain more from Twitter. We are novices but if you really want some expert Twitter information then we would strongly recommend @NikkiPilkington ‘s TweetMentor Twitter training.

Finally, the most IMPORTANT point (if you are not already) :

However, we found it pretty useless just using the main Twitter interface as we were unable to group the incoming tweets into "that looks interesting" or "what a load of rubbish" categories.  So, once we got the hang of using Twitter itself, we started looking around for some alternative desktop client applications. Well, we only have one Twitter account so we decided upon TweetDeck (if we had had more than one user account, perhaps we would have looked further into other desktop client applications such as Seesmic). We find TweetDeck to be the most user-friendly desktop Twitter client application and it makes it easy to monitor tweets and to group them in a meaningful and useful way. It also has a built in web address shortener which we have found invaluable as in Twitter you are restricted to tweets of up to 140 characters and no more !!! By the time you have added perhaps a long web address to a tweet, you soon run out of characters.

One of the reasons that some people give for not using Twitter is that it "takes too much time" or "I'm always out of the office". Well, these were the scenarios that, to be honest, we were particularly bothered about. We then found SocialOomph and this solved the problem (and then some !) as it allows you to schedule tweets to be sent out on a regular basis as and when you want (every hour if you want). The beauty of it is that you are able to create a subject to tweet about and then create several different ways in which to say anything about the subject; this is then randomised as the tweet "hits" its scheduled time.

The next "problem" to resolve was that of being able to access Twitter whilst away from the office on our mobiles. Well, the iPhone mobile clients seem great to us but we don't have iPhones; we have Blackberry Storms. So, first of all we downloaded and used TwitterBerry for a while, until ÜberTwitter was released and this is the mobile client that we now use as, in our opinion, it is so much better and has some really great extra features over those found in Twitterberry. We take photos with our Blackberry Storms and upload from within Ubertwitter and this works a treat. We also decided to try and save ourselves some time by using an add-on to auto-follow those twitter users that followed us and to send an automatic message to them. Some readers might think that this is maybe too impersonal but if you don't have enough hours in the day but still want to send a message to new followers then we consider this to be the best next thing to writing individual messages of thanks. Also, because we use SocialOomph for this as well, the "Thanks for following me" message changes each time automatically and therefore the messages can be really polite each time.

We have found it great to gain more Twitter followers but to be honest we would rather have a few quality followers than thousands of followers who are not really interested in what we have to say; some Twitter users just want to gain as many followers as they can themselves without really caring about the person they might temporarily follow. For this reason, we periodically go through all of the Twitter Users that we are following and also those that are following us and complete a block unfollow of those that we are not interested in following any longer. We currently use TwitterKarma to do this and this seems quite effective. We also use UnTweeps which seems to work a little different than TwitterKarma in that it monitors those Twitter users that you are following that have not created any tweets for some time and are most likely to have left Twitter entirely.

We have also recently come across TwitterForBusyPeople and this is great for looking at all of the people you are following and just seeing their most recent tweets; you can always then look at their other tweets if you have time.

If you are out of the office quite a lot as we are, then it is probably very important that you don't miss out on potential opportunities that might appear within Twitter users (tweeple) tweets. We particularly want to know if anyone mentions any of the software packages that we supply, implement, train and support so that we could offer our help and, if completely honest, hope to make a later sale to them of our services. Well, that is where TweetBeep has helped as if any of the keywords that we specify is tweeted anywhere in the world, we get an email alert to let us know that it has been mentioned and we then choose whether to start the dialogue with that Twitter user and perhaps to start following them.

Anyway, we hope that we have given you some basic ideas and we hope that these tips (many more to come in the future) will help you gain more from Twitter. We are novices but if you really want some expert Twitter information then we would strongly recommend @NikkiPilkington 's TweetMentor Twitter training.

Finally, the most IMPORTANT point (if you are not already) :