Free Twitter Tools and Apps

Twitter Tools for Analytics

1. My Top Tweet: Your Top 10 list of tweets

Find anyone’s Top 10 tweets, ordered by engagement.

2. Wildfire: Follower growth analysis

Compare your follower growth to your competitors’s follower growth. Simple, helpful, enlightening.

3. SocialBro: Analytics, optimization, and more

A nearly all-in-one platform for all things Twitter. The free plan comes with analytics, best time to tweet, follow/unfollow tools, and community segmentation.

4. Riffle: Data visualizations for any Twitter user

This browser plugin reveals vast insights into any Twitter user you choose. Discover statistics, popular hashtags, most shared links, connected profiles, and much more.

5. Twitonomy: Detailed analytics on users and tweets

A dashboard of analytics for whichever Twitter user you choose (even yours). Analyzes profiles, tweets, engagement, and more.

6. Klout: Twitter scores

Track your influencer score (on a scale of 1-100) and use the Klout dashboard to create and schedule new tweets.

7. SumAll: Email reports for Twitter stats

Sync your Twitter to SumAll, and start seeing daily or weekly emails on how your followers are growing, your mentions, and your engagement.

8. SocialRank: Follower analysis to find your most awesome fans

Receive a sorted list of your best followers, most influential followers, and most engaged followers. Useful to track the important people to engage with on Twitter.

9. Twtrland: A Twitter resume

Plug in your Twitter account to see a snapshot of who you follow, which demographics you fit, who’s in your close network, and more.

10. Bluenod: Community visualization

Type in a user or hashtag and see a detailed map or visualization about the community around the user or the people using the hashtag.

Twitter Tools for Chats

11. Beatstrap: Team liveblogging

Cover live news, sports, and events through Twitter, via hashtags, and collaborate with your team on the coverage. Completed “Beats” come with an embed code.

12. TweetChat: Twitter chat management

Log in to follow a specific hashtag, hang out in a room that collects the hashtagged tweets for you, and reply as you like (with the hashtag added automatically to your tweet).

13. Chat Salad: A calendar of Twitter chats

See upcoming Twitter chats and when they’re scheduled, as well as the hashtags they use (so you can follow along).

14. Twubs: Twitter chat homepages

Register a hashtag for your chat and collect/view the tweets from one location.

15. Nurph: Chat planning and organizing

Nurph channels let you plan and organize your chat, complete with follow-up stats and replays.

16. TwChat: Real-time chat rooms for Twitter chats

Submit your hashtag. Enter your chat room. Have fun!

Twitter Tools for Discovering Fresh Content and Fun Users

17. BuzzSumo: Find influencers, topic-by-topic

Type in a keyword to see which voices get the most shares on Twitter. Find influencers, sniff out headline ideas, and learn what works on Twitter and who’s working it.

18. Nuzzel: Discover what your friends are reading

As described by Twitter’s Joanna Geary, “find out what’s trending among the people the people you follow follow.” Make sense? Translation: Content discovery from friends and friend of friends.

19. Swayy: What your followers are interested in

See the content that your followers recommend plus the topics they most enjoy. View it all via the dashboard or from a daily email digest.

20. Twipho: Searchable Twitter feed of photos

Search by keyword or by location to find photos shared on Twitter.

21. Sonar Solo: Discover keyword-related content

Search any topic to see a visualization of the related topics, trends, and Twitter profiles connected to your search.

22. Topsy: A search engine for social

The most recent and most relevant tweets (and other social updates) based on a keyword search. Also shows keyword volume, sentiment score, and other analytics.

23. Digg Deeper: The best stories from your friends

An algorithmic display of the top articles and links that your Twitter followees have shared. Pair with News.me: a daily email newsletter of what your friends share on Twitter.

24. The Latest: A museum for the day’s best Twitter links

A real-time, constantly updated list of the most interesting links on Twitter, culled from the accounts of interesting people

Twitter Tools for Following & Unfollowing

25. ManageFlitter: Follow/unfollow in bulk

Segment your followers according to a number of factors: last tweet, follower count, location, language and whether or not they follow you back.

26. Tweepi: Tidy up who you follow

Cleanup inactive follows, flush those who don’t follow back, and reciprocate someone else’s follow—all done in bulk and with a few clicks of a checkbox.

27. Unfollowers: In-depth follow/unfollow

Get a complete breakdown of those you follow, and unfollow with ease.

28. DoesFollow: See who follows whom

Does A follow B? Does Bill Gates follow Skrillex? Does Guy Kawasaki follow Jay Baer?

Twitter Tools for Hashtags

29. Hashtagify.me: Complete analytics into any hashtag

Enter a hashtag to discover related tags, recent conversations, usage patterns, and influencers.

30. Rite tag: Hashtag recommender

Plug in a hashtag and see feedback on the tag’s reach and popularity as well as suggestions for some alternatives to try. Complete with pretty colors to see at-a-glance which hashtags are best.

31. Seen: Hashtag-based curation

Collect the media that was shared with a certain hashtag, then rank the results. Share your curation with friends and followers.

Twitter Tools for Mentions & Monitoring

32. Keyhole: LIke Google Alerts for Twitter

Ask Keyhole to notify you whenever a particular keyword, hashtag, or URL is mentioned. Helpful to track mentions of your own name or your company’s blog or campaign.

33. The One Million Tweetmap: Geolocated, real-time tweet monitoring

Track and follow keywords as they’re tweeted in real-time and at real places. Zoom in to a geotargeted area for super fine results.

34. Twilert: Real-time email alerts for keywords

Track keywords on Twitter and receive an email notification every time they’re mentioned. Great for keeping an eye on company names, new products, and branded hashtags.

35. Mention: Monitor your mentions

A listening tool for keeping up with all your mentions on Twitter. Tracks, analyzes, and displays any number of keywords via the Mention dashboard or via email digests.

36. MentionMapp: The web of you and those you mention

Get a visualization map of you and all the people you mention (and they people they mention).

37. Twazzup: Real-time keyword monitoring

Search and track any keyword, username, or hashtag. See a results page full of relevant tweets, user accounts, and influencers.

Twitter Tools for Scheduling Tweets

38. Buffer: Schedule your tweets (plus a whole lot more)

Simple social media management. Fill a queue of tweets, analyze their performance, and find new, hand-picked stories to share.

39. Tweet4me: Scheduled tweets via DM

Send a direct message to the Tweet4me account, use shorthand and prefixes to denote when to share, and let Tweet4me schedule and send the tweet for you.

Twitter Tools for Timing

40. Followerwonk: Search Twitter bios and analyze your followers

Every analysis imaginable for your Twitter feed, your profile, your followers, and your competitors.

41. Tweriod: Find the best times to tweet

Tweriod analyzes the tweets you send and your followers’s tweets to find the optimal time for engagement.

Twitter Tools for Trending Topics

42. Trends24: Detailed breakdowns of trending terms

See trending terms from the last—you guessed it—24 hours, broken out hour-by-hour and country-by-country. Enlightening for social media campaigns and geographic/timing research.

43. Trendsmap: Monitoring for local Twitter trends

A zoomable map that shows popular hashtags and terms from anywhere in the world with easy-click buttons to hone in on My City, My Region, and more.

44. iTrended: Did it trend?

Search the past 15 days to find whether certain keywords trended or not.

Top Twitter Clients

45. Tweetdeck: The king of Twitter clients

Via the app or the web, stay on top of your Twitter stream with Tweetdeck’s organization and tracking tools. Split your stream into segmented columns to stay engaged with what’s important.

46. YoruFukurou – Twitter client

A native Twitter client for Mac OS X. Dashboard views of incoming tweets, lists, and searches, split across multiple tabs. Comes highly recommended from Kottke.org.

47. Happy Friends: Mailbox-type reader

Pick the friends you want to hear from. Never miss their tweets. View all their activity via an inbox-style layout with nested updates.

Miscellaneous Twitter Tools

48. TW Birthday: Dig up the date someone joined Twitter (even if they won’t say)

For those who omit the “date joined” on their profile, there’s still a way to discover it. See how long your new favorite follow has been tweeting or when a new profile officially landed.

49. Bio is Changed: be alerted when someone changes their Twitter bio (good for job moves)

Rather self-descriptive, this tool updates you when someone changestheir Twitter bio. Useful if you’d like to track job moves and major news or even to learn from how people craft unique Twitter bios.

50. Like Explorer: See shares per article

Type in a URL. See the share numbers. Simple.

51. Tweet Beat: List management

A powerful tool for managing your Twitter lists—adding, removing, discovering, and sharing.

52. and 53. IFTTT & Zapier: Automate your tweeting

Connect multiple apps in unique ways to your Twitter account. For example, post your Instagram pictures as native Twitter photos.

54. Be Present: Track how fast you respond on Twitter

Real-time reports on your response time, response rate, and performance based on industry benchmarks. Also, really pretty to look at.

55. SavePublishing: Tweetable snippets on any website

Install the bookmarklet, and you can reveal any tweetable sentences (140 characters or fewer) from any article.

56. Tweekly: Once-a-week email of tweets you care about

Tell Tweekly which Twitter account you want to hear from, Tweekly pulls all their tweets and emails you weekly.

57. GroupTweet: Collaborate with teammates on one account

Let your teammates and coworkers share to the same account automatically with zero password-sharing. GroupTweet can even append usernames on to the end of individual tweets.

58. Storify: Beautiful Twitter storytelling

Grab any number of tweets and media elements, and place them all into a Storify collection that you can embed and share anywhere.

59. Tweet Topic Explorer: A word cloud per user

Discover the most-used words of any user you choose (even you).

Source: http://www.techgig.com/readnews.php?category=Other+Technology+news&tgnews_link=http%3A%2F%2Ffeedproxy.google.com%2F~r%2Ftimeblogs%2Fnerd_world%2F~3%2FeI7SB4WkSas%2F&tg_type=rss&tgnews_id=49823

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34 Free Online Tools to Help You Run Your Business

The Internet abounds with tools and resources for running a business. Here are 34 free online tools that can help you analyze your website, schedule appointments, invoice customers, and everything in between.

Accounting & Invoicing

• Wave – Accounting is one of the most important functions of any business. Wave will not only help you keep your books, but you can invoice your customers too.
• Zoho – It would be easier to say what you cannot do with Zoho. This free online business 

File Storage

• Google Drive – Google Drive gives you 15 GB storage space free.
• Dropbox – Dropbox is one of the most popular file storage services online. They have an upgraded service for businesses, but if your business is small enough you can use the free version and get up to 2GB storage space.
• Evernote – Evernote allows you to clip anything you want from the Web and save it for later use. You can also upload images and files and keep track of your research more easily.

Document Creation

• Google Docs – If you do a lot of writing or create correspondence on a regular basis, you can do it easily with Google Docs. You can also create spreadsheets and presentations.
• Zoho – Everything you can do in Google Docs or Microsoft Word can also be done with Zoho.
• ThinkFree – ThinkFree gives you 1 GB of free storage space, and you can create your word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation documents on the website.Website Analytics

• Google Analytics – The granddaddy of analytics programs. Some business owners won't use anything else.
• Piwik – A worthy alternative to Google Analytics.
• TrendCounter – Not as robust as Google Analytics or Piwik, but not bad.

Content Management

• WordPress – What started out as a blogging tool has become one of the Web's best and most used content management systems. You can build your website on WordPress.
• Joomla – Flexible, easy to use, and used by millions of businesses around the world.
• Wix – Wix is a web-based website creation tool and content management system.
• Weebly – Just like Wix, with drag-and-drop features.

E-mail List Management

• MailChimp – Free up to 2,000 subscribers. A great way to get started with e-mail marketing.
• MailerMailer – Up to 200 free messages a month.
• WordPress – You can manage your mailing list straight from WordPress, but you'll need to use a plugin.

Social Media Management

• Hootsuite – Hootsuite allows you to post messages to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ pages, LinkedIn, and other social media accounts. It also allows lets you assign multiple managers to those accounts.
• SocialOomph – SocialOomph will allow you to preschedule your tweets and track keywords. You can also manage Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plurk through your SocialOomph account.
• Everypost – Manage your social media from your iPhone.

Payment Systems

• Square – Take credit card payments on your smartphone with this free card reader.
• Pay N Seconds – Accept multiple forms of payment with this free solution.
• PayPal – Take global payments. Get a free account and pay a fee per transaction. It's free to transfer money to your bank.

Appointment Scheduling

• Doodle – Schedule group meetings with input from other group members.
• Calendly – Integrates well with Google Calendar (also free). Schedule appointments and set up automated reminders.
• YouCanBook.Me – Another free scheduling tool that integrates with Google Calendar.

Web Conferencing

• Anymeeting – Free online Web conferencing. Includes lots of cool features like screen share, YouTube integration, and meeting recording.
• Google+ Hangout – Google changed the online meeting landscape when it introduced Google+ Hangouts, which allows you to record your meetings and post them to YouTube. You need a Google+ account.
• Zoho – Remember, there isn't much you can't do with Zoho—even hold online meetings.

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Render & Fetch - New Update of Google Webmaster

Rendering pages with Fetch as Google

The Fetch as Google feature in Webmaster Tools provides webmasters with the results of Googlebot attempting to fetch their pages. The server headers and HTML shown are useful to diagnose technical problems and hacking side-effects, but sometimes make double-checking the response hard: Help! What do all of these codes mean? Is this really the same page as I see it in my browser? Where shall we have lunch? We can't help with that last one, but for the rest, we've recently expanded this tool to also show how Googlebot would be able to render the page.

Viewing the rendered pageIn order to render the page, Googlebot will try to find all the external files involved, and fetch them as well. Those files frequently include images, CSS and JavaScript files, as well as other files that might be indirectly embedded through the CSS or JavaScript. These are then used to render a preview image that shows Googlebot's view of the page.

You can find the Fetch as Google feature in the Crawl section of Google Webmaster Tools. After submitting a URL with "Fetch and render," wait for it to be processed (this might take a moment for some pages). Once it's ready, just click on the response row to see the results.

Handling resources blocked by Robots.txt

Googlebot follows the robots.txt directives for all files that it fetches. If you are disallowing crawling of some of these files (or if they are embedded from a third-party server that's disallowing Googlebot's crawling of them), we won't be able to show them to you in the rendered view. Similarly, if the server fails to respond or returns errors, then we won't be able to use those either (you can find similar issues in the Crawl Errors section of Webmaster Tools). If we run across either of these issues, we'll show them below the preview image.

We recommend making sure Googlebot can access any embedded resource that meaningfully contributes to your site's visible content, or to its layout. That will make Fetch as Google easier for you to use, and will make it possible for Googlebot to find and index that content as well. Some types of content – such as social media buttons, fonts or website-analytics scripts – tend not to meaningfully contribute to the visible content or layout, and can be left disallowed from crawling. For more information, please see our previous blog post on how Google is working to understand the web better.

We hope this update makes it easier for you to diagnose these kinds of issues, and to discover content that's accidentally blocked from crawling. If you have any comments or questions, let us know here or drop by in thewebmaster help forum. Subsribe this blog for more Google Webmaster Updates



Resource : Official Webmaster Blog

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How to analyse a Competitor

Have you ever looked at a competitor’s website and wondered why they were ranking higher than you in search engines?

In this post, we’re going to walk through the process of completing a search engine optimization (SEO) analysis, a tool to help you better understand the competitive landscape of search engine rankings in your industry.

This SEO competitive analysis will provide a base of knowledge and a strategic foundation you can use to outrank your competitors in Google and other search engines.

Creating a List of Relevant Keywords

The first step to any effective SEO initiative is knowing what keywords you want people to search in order to find your business.

For example, if I owned a San Diego flower delivery service, I might use these variations of a keyword:

·        San Diego flower delivery

·        Who delivers flowers in San Diego

·        Flower delivery San Diego

A keyword list is what I like to call the “keyword portfolio.” — an organized file with the relevant keywords that you would like to rank for in search engines, where you currently rank for these keywords, and where your competitors currently rank for these keywords.

Your keyword portfolio will be an evolving list of keywords that you’ll constantly be adding to and subtracting from as your strategy changes.

If you don’t have a keyword portfolio already, you can easily create one with a simple Excel spreadsheet using the following three columns from left to right:

·        Targeted Keyword

·        Overall Position in Search Engine

o   Found by searching for the targeted keyword and making note of your website’s position in the results (1-10)

·        Description of Competitor Rankings

o   Where are your main competitors ranking for the searched keyword?

As you go through the process of setting up this spreadsheet, you’ll likely come across other keywords your competitors’ are using, which should be added to your keyword portfolio.

Link Analysis with Moz Open Site Explorer

Apart from strong use of relevant keywords, the number of links to you

In the next part of your competitive analysis, I recommend using the Moz Open Site Explorer to see the types of links your competitors have.

Doing so will answer three very important questions for you:

·        How many links do my competitors have?

·        Are there links my competitors have that I don’t, but that I can get?

·        Which of my competitors is most skilled at getting links?

In order to get started using the Open Site Explorer, let’s assume that we operate Allen’s Flowers, a floral shop located in San Diego, California.

First, type the website into the search bar:

Make sure you’ve clicked “Compare up to 5 sites” under the search bar.

Next, type in a few of your competitors (I’ll be using several other San Diego Floral shops):

Once you click “Compare” you’ll be taken to the results of the comparison:

The default results will have the “Compare Link Metrics” tab kept open. Here’s why this tab is important to you:

·        Total Links: This shows the total number of links pointing to your site, including internal links (links between your own web pages), and external links (links from other websites)

·        Total External Links: This is the total number of links from other websites. There are usually many links that appear repeatedly.

·        Followed Linking Root Domains: This will be your most important statistic. This section shows you how many unique websites (“linking root domains”) have links that Google counts (Google ignores “nofollow” links) for your site.

There are many other results and statistics listed on this page, but these are the most important ones to help with your SEO competitive analysis.

In order to get a more detailed look at what the links pointing at these sites look like, click on the “Inbound Links” tab.

Then, we can filter out some of the results to figure out which links are actually helping your site and the sites of your competitors.

Click on the filters to change them to say:

Show “ONLY FOLLOW” links from “ONLY EXTERNAL” pages to “PAGES ON THIS SUBDOMAIN” and “SHOW LINKS UNGROUPED”.

Now, click “Filter” to get your results.

Once you’ve gotten your results, ask yourself the following questions about the links:

·        Does the anchor text match my keyword? The displayed text of a link is known as “anchor text”.

·        Does the link come from a page with high authority? A link on a high page authority would be worth a lot more than a link on a low page authority (e.g. MSNBC.com would have more page authority than a local news site)

·        Does the link come from a domain with high authority? This is similar to the previous question, but Google looks first at the page authority (popularity of a single page), before checking domain authority.

This exercise is intended to help you comb through your competitors’ link portfolios to see if there are any patterns you can detect.

Try to get as much information as you possibly can off of these reports. Remember, link portfolios are not the entire picture, but a large part of that picture.

The other factor that is a big part of where you’re ranked on Google is on-page SEO. If you have a website with many links and Google-friendly on-page SEO, you’ll climb to the top.

The next tool I’m going to introduce you to for help with on-page SEO is SEOToolsCentral.

Monitoring Competitors’ On-page SEO

SEOToolsCentral is one of the best tools to go in-depth with your SEO competitive analysis.

SEOToolsCentral is a website review tool that shows you a ton of on-page SEO factors which contribute to Google’s ranking of your website. Once it analyzes a site, it will create a report that gives you valuable information about that site including:

·        Traffic

·        Social Media

·        SEO Details (meta description, header tags, keywords, etc.)

·        Server Hosting Information

Once your report is generated, the first section you’ll see is the “On Site Optimization” information. SEOToolsCentral gives you helpful information about various on-page SEO factors in this report. If there’s information you don’t understand, check out Moz’s SEO Glossary for simple explanations.

Remember, SEOToolsCentral is a guide for you to identify issues with your website and opportunities your competitors aren’t taking advantage of.

Identifying Your Top Competitors

Once you’ve gathered all the data from your keyword spreadsheet, Open Site Explorer, and SEOToolsCentral, the next step is to take that information and determine who exactly your top competitors are.

Any site you’ve seen pop up consistently in Google’s rankings is one you can probably consider as a “Top Competitor”. Figuring out the next two or three top competitors might be a little trickier though.

I like to keep four specific criteria in mind when determining who my top competitors are. For instance:

·        Lots of Links: again, Google’s main attribute for SEO is links. If a site has a ton of links, this is most likely a site to keep your eye on.

·        Ranking at the Top of Google: any site that consistently ranks at the top of Google for your target keywords is very likely a direct competitor.

·        Lots of On-page SEO: using SEOToolsCentral, you can easily see if a site has invested time into their on-page SEO.

·        Many “Following” Linking Root Domains: this signals a site is your direct competitor, because they have many different links from many different places.

How To Beat the Competition

The most important step to beating your competitors is gathering as much information you can through your keyword portfolio, Open Site Explorer, and SEOToolsCentral.

Once you discover the reasons for your competitors’ high rankings, you’ll have a solid view of what you need to do to overtake them.

Here are the next steps you can take after finishing your SEO competitive analysis:

·        Updating your list of “Top Competitors” depending on the most recent rankings on Google

·        Adding to and updating your “Keywords Portfolio” based on your competitors’ pages

·        Adding new pages to your site based on promising new keywords you find so that Google can rank you for that keyword

·        Determining what your competitors are doing in terms of both a) link building and b) on-page SEO, so that you can strategize to overtake them

Remember, a competitive analysis is important mostly for giving you a baseline about your place in the competitive landscape.

You’ll have to revisit your SEO competitive analysis often in order to maintain your knowledge of Google’s rankings. Going through this process regularly — once every couple months or so — will allow you to become an expert player and take the knowledge gained to increase your website’s ranking.

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