Here are 6 ways to use the search tool to help increase your sales and get the most out of Twitter:

1. Search for your name. If someone is talking about you, you need to know it! People will often send a tweet such as, “Does anyone know Joe Blow?” or “Has anyone done business with Susie Marketer?”

If someone is talking about you, they might certainly be a great potential customer. If someone asks, “Do you know of a great content writer?” and someone mentions your name, then that is a great lead for a client!

2. Search for your company. If you have a search for Joe Blow Marketing Company and find out that someone is discussing your company, that can be a great lead for business or it can give you an early warning if there is a problem.

3. Search for your product. If you sell Miracle Widgets and someone is searching for that term, then you certainly have a potential lead. Or it can give you some insight to your competition. Either way, it is good to know.

4. Search for your competitor’s name, company or products. This can give you an idea of what people are saying about him and give you a leg up on the competition.

5. Search for like-minded people. This can be for local people or anywhere. Networking with others gives you a whole new circle of business contacts. You can search for terms like your city, state, niche, or anything else that might help you find people to follow that could work with you.

6. Search for people who can complement what you offer. If you are great at building websites, but cannot write worth a hoot, then search for writers that might want to partner with you.

These tips will help you focus your search and find the best people to build your customer base and maximize your profits.

Enjoy your weekend

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While some of these tools are just for fun, others are taken rather seriously by people who interpret the data to find new ways to build their following and influence.

Here’s the low down on a few of the more popular tools being used to analyze a person’s Twitter activity.

1. Social Oomph formerly Tweet Later – Social Oomph lets you set up a tweet or a series of tweets and schedule them for broadcast later. While this flies in the face of the interactive nature of Twitter, many people find it convenient for times they want to announce something at times they will be unable to do so manually. Social Oomph will also let you automatically follow anyone who follows you and you can even automatically send a welcome message to your new followers.

2. Social Too – Social Too will also give you the option of automatically following people who follow you as well as send them a welcome. Social Too sends you an email each morning with a list of all the people who followed or un-followed you the previous day.

3. Tweet Beep is a service that sends you an alert whenever your chosen keywords are mentioned. You can use Tweet Beep to monitor when your name, your brand or your competition is mentioned. Tweet Beep can also keep an eye on how often your URL is mentioned, even if it’s used in a shortened URL.

4. URL Shortening Services – Because Twitter limits you to only 140 characters per tweet, posting a link to your website can be troublesome. There are several services, such as budurl.com or tinyurl.com that let you type in the URL of any site and will then shorten it into a clickable URL that uses fewer characters.

5. Tweet Stats is a hub for analysis of Twitter trends. Tweet Stats will show you a graph of your tweets per hour and per month. You can see which days you tweet the most in a Tweet timeline and you can also see your reply statistics.

6. Twitter Counter is a widget you can add to your profile, blog or Website. It provides the quantity of your followers by week, month and quarter. Twitter Counter will also predict the future number of your followers based on your average gains/losses.

7. Twitter Grader is a very popular stat tool on Twitter. Twitter Grader looks at the number of your followers, the power of your network, the frequency of your updates and the completeness of your profile and gives you a percentile score.

These are just a few of the services designed to help you use Twitter as productively as possible. While they can all provide you with useful information, its important to remember that they can all have incorrect data available to them as well.

So ultimately, let the effectiveness of your “Twitter time be determined by the interaction you have with others” and the results you get with you business.

Have a great Day!

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Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s my demographic. But who the heck cares about MySpace?

The MySpace addition to TweetDeck, though, shows how much CEO Iain Dodsworth wants TweetDeck to become, in his words, “a browser for the real-time Web.”

I like TweetDeck a lot. I use it and Seesmic Desktop in equal proportions. But I’m not sure I want my Twitter client to get all fancy and over-ambitious. Twitter is hard enough to manage even with a good, clean client. If TweetDeck adds support for other real-time feeds–Dodsworth mentions Last.fm, Songkick, and Doppler, for example–then I worry about the clarity of TweetDeck’s Twitter experience getting murky.

Although there are some integrations that can work. I welcome TweetDeck 0.30’s improved Facebook support. It now supports photo streams and makes it easy to update Facebook directly from Twitter, among other features. While Twitter and Facebook have different feature sets that make mixing the two networks in one application a little weird, in TweetDeck they run in separate columns and stay nice and separate. (Seesmic Desktop can merge streams from Twitter and Facebook in a single column, quite successfully.)

Credit: (Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Other improvements in the new version of TweetDeck include even tighter Bitly integration, down to the app’s automatic and instant conversion of long links to short ones as you type them (cool) and the capability to drag photos directly into TweetDeck to post them to Facebook (also cool). You can also click on a hashtag in a tweet to kick off a new search column for that tag.

TweetDeck also gets a new list of recommended Twitter accounts for users to follow, and the way you add users is particularly elegant: you can add a whole collection of Twitterers in a topic, like “Journalists,” and TweetDeck creates a new column in the interface to follow just those accounts. Unfortunately the process for getting accounts on to the TweetDeck recommended lists is opaque or “editorial” at the moment, although Dodsworth does say he’ll move to a crowd-sourced model shortly.

The new version’s user interface appears to be cleaned up. However, it’s really that some options are now hidden in second-level menus.

And still missing is an option to get a notification sound only on @replies or direct messages. Sometimes I run Seesmic Desktop just for that one feature.

In sum, version 0.30 is a decent upgrade to TweetDeck, although the app is approaching feature overload with its continuing addition of new services.

You Can Reach Rafe Here, Enjoy

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One of the coolest things about Twitter is how open it is. The company has published the specs for accessing the service, so that outsiders can write their own Twitter programs (Twitterific, Tweetie, Tweetdeck and so on)–and create Web sites that access the stream of Twitter posts and add all kinds of features.

“For example, there are Web sites that help you figure out whom to “follow”: wefollow.com, mrtweet.com, whoshouldifollow.com, and so on.”

There are sites dedicated to tracking who’s been retweeted (that is, whose comments are interesting or funny enough to pass on to your own audience) most often, like Retweetist.com and Retweetradar.com. There are sites that calculate people’s influence by number of followers and other factors (twittercounter.com, twitanalyzer.com).

There are also sites that let you include photos or even videos as part of your tweets (twitpic.com, posterous.com).

But I’ll tell you the site that saved my bacon.

Starting in March, I began collaborating on a book with my Twitter followers (500,000 at the time). Each night, I’d ask a question about life or love or current events. My followers responded with, in the end, 25,000 responses, which I winnowed down to a couple of pages of the very best and funniest ones for the book.

Anyway, the project was a lot more difficult than it sounds. It turns out that tweets don’t stay on the Internet forever. There is a search function on Twitter, but it “sees” only the last few days’ worth of tweets. Just figuring out how to capture the thousands of responses to my questions became a daunting project.

Then there’s the little matter of figuring out which tweets, in my massive tweetstream, were meant to be responses to which questions. Especially since the responses sometimes arrived days after I’d asked the questions.

We finally hit gold with yet another one of those third-party Web sites: Twitoaster.com. This Web site, created by a guy outside Paris named Arnaud Meunier, bestows Twitter with something that it otherwise lacks: threading. In other words, it groups replies with the tweets that inspired them.

It’s also filled with analysis tools, showing, for a particular Twitter member, how many replies he or she is generating, how various Twitterers rank, and–most useful for our book project–what day of the week, or time of day, seems to produce the most replies. (There’s a handy visual instruction sheet at http://twitoaster.com/quick-guide.)

Better yet, Twitoaster holds onto your tweets and replies forever, which is a lot longer than Twittter does.

But even Twitoaster couldn’t always save us, because its threading works only if people reply by hitting the Reply button in Twitter. That is, if someone decides to reply by sending a fresh tweet (maybe they don’t even know about the Reply button), Twitoaster can’t associate it with the original post.

Anyway, it was a far more exhausting project than I ever anticipated. But the result, “The World According to Twitter,” finally arrived last week. It is, if I may say so, hilarious and often poignant–and I couldn’t have done it without the Web’s torrent of Twitter tools.

Read The Full Story Here, Enjoy

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We created Tweepi out of our own need for some of these scripts. We’re constantly looking to follow quality tweeples, and trying to unfollow deadbeat users. We simply want to do more on Twitter in less time!

More over, Tweepi is self-defined as “a simple collection of Twitter tools”, and that is an accurate way of transmitting its essence. There are many new Twitterers out there, and as such there is a demand for websites
that include all that is needed for managing a Twitter account in a manner that doesn’t actually take up the best part of a day.

These tools include the ones for cleaning and tidying up any account (and getting rid of spammers on the spot), as well as the resources for ensuring that you will not wind up following those who are timewasters.

Furthermore, one entitled “Reciprocate” lets you follow those who are following you but that you are not following yet. And one that goes by the name of “Flush” lets you do exactly the opposite, and unfollow tweeps that you follow but that are not following you back.

Finally, it must be mentioned that (according to the site) more tools are forthcoming.

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Thanks to an open API and a philosophy of interconnectivity, Twitter’s vast array of third-party services has you covered on a number of alternative uses for the famed microblogging tool.

Let’s take a look at a few of them.

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Finding the right Twitter applications is a challenge for social media managers, though, because new apps seem to spring up each day and they often have overlapping feature sets.

This is a list of the top Twitter tools to manage your social media engagement with your customers. While it isn’t a comprehensive list of every available tool, it does cover the market leaders in each category. Let us know in the comments which other tools you use to manage your professional Twitter work flow.

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Here is a brief recap of some of the more popular Twitter optimization tools. These tools undergo frequent review to determine if changes are needed. New releases and enhancements are rolled out on a frequent basis to benefit the user community. Hootsuite launched their new 2.0 release recently. Tweetdeck has a big upgrade – v0.27 nearly ready as of this writing.

Hootsuite – Recently upgraded to version 2.0 with many more features (similar to Tweetdeck)

Some features are…

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