Twitter is a valuable social media tool for personal branding, but if you’re not sure how to manage Twitter efficiently, it can be an overwhelming task. The zillion tweets, hashtags and conversations going on in one second on Twitter are enough to cause anyone a headache! Thankfully, there are many tools you can use to help you manage different aspects of your Twitter engagement. Here are five tools I use to make my Twitter experience more manageable for personal branding:

#1: Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media dashboard that allows you to manage many different platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Twitter.

Available through your browser, as well as smartphone and tablet apps, Hootsuite centralizes all of your social media activities into one place. I specifically like how it helps manage my Twitter account because it puts everything into columns that I create. I have columns for Sent Tweets, Pending Tweets and Direct Messages, in addition to columns for hashtags and Twitter lists that I am following. At a glance, I can manage my mentions and messages, and monitor activity from my keywords and influencers – all without changing screens.

If you’ve never managed your Twitter account through a social media dashboard, I highly recommend you give it a try. It makes your Twitter experience so much more efficient and less cumbersome. There are many different types of social media dashboards to choose from, including TweetDeck, SocialOomph and SproutSocial, so experiment and find the best one for you.

#2: TweetAdder

TweetAdder is a licensed software program for Twitter marketing and promotion. It offers many features – some of which I don’t use – but I love the features that I do. Through TweetAdder, I can search Twitter users’ profile descriptions and tweets to target new followers. I also use TweetAdder’s unfollow feature, which allows me to siphon out Twitter users with default profile images (the dreaded egg) or inactive accounts.

I also use TweetAdder’s thank you autoresponder, which sends out a “thanks for following” message to new followers. Additionally, you can upload tweets into TweetAdder to post with random time delay (this is a great feature to rotate tweets linked to your blog posts).

As I mentioned, I do not use all of TweetAdder’s features (there are a lot more), so be sure to research this tool before you make the investment.

#3: Click To Tweet

If you’ve read my blog before, you’ll notice I often put a message in my blog posts that says “Click here to tweet this.” This is a great way to put a mini-call to action in my blog posts, and I get many readers who do click to tweet my message.

How do I get Twitter to tweet my sentence? I use Click To Tweet, an easy-to-use website where you can promote your message. On Click To Tweet, enter what you want to tweet into the box, and it will create a unique URL for you. Anytime someone clicks on this unique URL, they can tweet your message.

When you use Click To Tweet, you are encouraging social interaction in your articles and blog posts. <Click here to tweet this.>

#4: Tweet Old Post

If you have a WordPress blog, check out the Tweet Old Post plug-in to help you direct more traffic to your site.

With Tweet Old Post, you can share new and old blog posts with Twitter, using parameters you’ve established when you install the plug-in. You designate the time between tweets and the number of posts you want tweeted daily. You can include hashtags and your favorite URL shortener to track the number of clicks. Additionally, you can tell Tweet Old Post to not tweet posts from certain categories.

I get a steady flow of traffic to my blog from Tweet Old Post. It’s a great way to automate your blog promotion, and it puts you in full control of what goes out into the Twitterverse.

#5: Paper.li

Paper.li is a content curation tool that I use to find new followers and articles to tweet about. Think of it as an “online newspaper” you create based on topics of interest to you.

I have a paper.li set up for “Social Media for Personal Branding,” and every day, I send out a copy of it to my Twitter followers. By using Paper.li, I have found great content to tweet, as well as new followers who share similar interests with me. And when I tweet that day’s edition, paper.li finds 2-3 of the contributors I’ve pulled content from and adds their Twitter handles to the tweet, which helps with my Twitter engagement.

Setting up your own paper.li is easy. You tell paper.li the keywords, hashtags and Twitter users you want to curate content from, and it pulls information into the online newspaper. You can share your paper.li on Twitter, as well as other social media networks.

Don’t let Twitter overwhelm you! These five tools will help you manage your Twitter account, find new followers, direct traffic to your blog and curate content in no time. Do you have a favorite Twitter tool not mentioned in this article? Let me know in the comments below. I would love to check it out!

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