I’d be surprised if you don’t immediately grab at least one of these productivity-enhancers.
Quick tip on Jan. 28, 2011: I just discovered these tools recently and am still trying them myself. Some of them are very new and a little buggy, but if you like their concept (or even if you don’t), reply to them on Twitter with feedback. They’ll love you for it.
Save time on Twitter and off it
Formulists
Official description: “Organize groups of people on Twitter into smart, auto-updating Twitter lists! Filter and network with people based on location/bio keywords, Twitter activity, number of followers and more”
Why I like it: If you’re not a regular user of Twitter Lists, you will be after trying Formulists. Use it to categorize your Twitter friends quickly and easily, so you can better follow the right groups of people at the right times in your schedule.
Tweriod
Official description: “Tweriod will analyse your followers’ streams, work out when they are online the most and let you know the best time to post your tweets!”
Why I like it: Simple- I want to know when is the best time to go on Twitter, especially handy across countries and timezones. It can take over a day to get the final report, so be patient.
Only the Links
Official description: “A simple Twitter client focused on only showing you Tweets with links. When appropriate, we’ll even show you a preview of that link. This app makes it easy to filter and consume the good stuff people are sharing on Twitter.”
Why I like it: The ideal tool if Twitter has become your main source of shared links i.e. replacing your RSS feed reader. I like to point OTL at one of my Twitter Lists, public or private, and see what’s trendy without having to scroll through quotes and conversation.
Tweet Memo
Official description: “You’ve got something you want to remember later? Don’t have a Post-it? Send us a tweet, we’ll ping you back when you want.”
Why I like it: Make Twitter your personal reminder service. Tweet Memo can DM you for private reminders, or you can reply to it publicly when you want your followers to see the reminder too. If you keep your Twitter client running all the time, I could see you using this.
Auto Thanks
Official description: “Even if you are the rudest ass#0!5, others will see you as the most refined gentleman with this application that [sic] automaticaly thanks others for retweets and #FollowFriday.”
Why I like it: Who doesn’t appreciate the simple acknowledgment of their RT? It can also be a conversation starter. Thanking people one by one is easy if you don’t get RT’ed a lot, but using this tool means that THEORETICALLY you won’t need to worry regardless of how many RTs you get. Unfortunately, for now it only seems to work when there are few people to thank – almost completely defeating the purpose of the tool – so hopefully improvements are on the way.
Follow Friday
Official description: “This simple app will generate #FollowFriday tweets for you according to your retweets, favorited tweets and replies the last 7 days.”
Why I like it: From the same creator of Auto Thanks, the main difference is that this tool scans relevant tweets over the past 7 days, and not just 24 hours like Auto Thanks. Which means that it suffers even more from performance issues, but still a nice site when it works.
InboxCleaner
Official description: “Clean your Twitter inbox quickly and easily using InboxCleaner.”
Why I like it: Anyone who uses Auto-Follow like I do knows that you’re going to get DM spam, and this kind of tool can take a lot of the pain away. The free version is limited to 25 direct messages deleted per day, and that includes copies of direct messages you’ve sent. The user interface could use some improvements to make the filtering quicker to apply, but this tool definitely has potential.
A strategy for using them all together
- Use Formulists to create a Twitter List of e.g. industry pros.
- Use Tweriod to learn when those list members are likely to be on Twitter.
- Use Only the Links to see what they’re sharing, share alike and hopefully get shared.
- Use Tweet Memo to remind yourself to use Auto Thanks and Follow Friday to appreciate your sharers.
- Use Tweet Memo again to remind yourself to use your free daily inbox deletion quota from InboxCleaner.
Author:
Jacob Share, a job search expert, is the creator of JobMob, one of the biggest blogs in the world about finding jobs. Follow him on Twitter for job search tips and humor.
