I use Twitter every day and am finding it to be a useful marketing tool. However, I’m not addicted to it and still find that my blog is the best way to reach out to an audience. But, even at my fairly low level or usage  – I have around 500 followers and followees altogether for my various Twitter accounts so nothing too unwieldy – it can soon get out of control.

Tweetdeck and Hootsuite are popular Twitter management tools but I was never able to download the first of them and didn’t find the second very easy to use. So I’ve always taken a less complicated but effective approach.

First I employ a couple of the tools on the Twitter page itself. I’ve found creating lists to be a handy of segregating my followers into similar groups for quicker reading through. I also keep an eye on the ‘connect’ info and check for direct messages every day too. That keeps me almost on top of things. However, from time to time I have a clear out.

Twitcleaner in my opinion is definitely the best, although justunfollow is pretty good too. Good, even though it listed Books Are Cool as a dupe site! Cheek! This had happened because I tried Bookbuzzr out for a month and one of the services it offered was a daily promotional tweet for a book. I signed up for this, but even when I terminated my account with Bookbuzzr since I didn’t see that I was getting any benefit from it, the emails kept being sent. These have counted against me. They’re stopped now so my ranking should improve fairly soon now. My other accounts, @llamamum and @ebookedit, came out as top notch, hooray. I liked the way Twitcleaner’s analysis shows you Tweeps who don’t follow you, Tweeps who haven’t Tweeted in ages and in contrast, those that send an implausible number of Tweets per day, Tweeps who are snobby (i.e. hardly follow anyone else), Tweeps who only retweet rather than created original Tweets, and so on. Interesting stuff!

Tweriod is also very good. It finds the best time for you to tweet by analysing your last 5000 tweets. This best time is the time at which you’re most likely to get retweeted. It’s a free analysis although there are upgraded analyses you can pay for. You’re sent a DM when your report is ready. My best times are 4-6 pm and 8-9 pm I’m told.

I have just happened across this post which looks very useful with 20 Twitter management tools listed, so check it out. I’m tempted to give Social Oomph and Social Bro a whirl. I’ll report back another time to tell you how I’ve got on with those.