Tools for Tweeting

Not exactly a writing or story related post today, but some of the tools I left out of the Tools for Indie Writers post a few weeks back were social networking tools, and I wanted to share what I use to keep up my Twitter account.

Before I started on this indie author business last year I had a twitter, but I didn't know what to do with it. The only people I followed were Neil Gaiman and my fiance and I never tweeted. But no one will seek out your stuff unless they know you exist, so I got online, learned how to use Twitter effectively, and here I am, making enough money to pay TWO bills every month. (Woo!)

I like Twitter over other social networking options for a few reasons. A gajillion people are on it, for one. For another, it doesn't seem to care how pornographic my posts get. For those of you who follow me on twitter, you know I can get...interesting.  It's easy to use and limiting one's posts to 140 characters is great for the short attention spans of the 21st century.

The best part was getting to the point where I needed tools to manage my twitter account. Most twitter management programs require you to pay them money, but as long as you don't have more than one account I've discovered it's easy to cover your bases with just two management sites.

Manage Flitter
Their paid membership covers all kinds of stuff, but if you don't want to go that route, this is the best site I've found for finding and unfollowing your unfollowers (allowing you to free up space for new followers). It also weeds out spam accounts. Sadly that's about all you can do with the free account, but it allows you to bulk unfollow and while it limits the number of unfollows you have per day you can unlock more with little issue.

Social Oomph
This is the site's shtick is being able to post across multiple types of social media...with a paid account. It has a lot of options for free though. I mainly use it to schedule tweets for later. Back when I had a job I used to work a lot of double shifts w/o access to the internet. I didn't like my presence being gone all day long, so I would write out posts in advance.  You can schedule as many tweets as you want ahead of time with this service's free account, and it also offers a variety of statistics, a URL shortener, and some follower management with the free account.

And those two sites are the only things I use to manage my Twitter account. I've found facebook to be mostly useless and tedious. I have a facebook page, but I pretty much ignore it.  Ditto Google+ (though I get more traffic there than on Facebook). I'm considering the possibilities of Pinterest right now, but I still havent decided if I like it or not. I'm not active on Goodreads because I find the site design tedious.  Twitter. It's where its at.