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Maintaining a Twitter account looks like a lot of work -and it is-, but it doesn’t have to be a burden. Luckily, there are a number of shortcuts for everything, and knowing where to start and what tools to use will help you enjoy your relationship with Twitter for once and for all.

How to find interesting profiles to follow

In order to connect with other users and start building relationships, you’ll first need to find those people and there are a number of tools and tips I’d like to share with you:

FollowerWonk

Followerwonk is a social analytics tool for Twitter that allows you to track your follower gains and losses, compare Twitter accounts and analyze their followers. Pretty cool, uh? There’s another option that you can use for doing global searches:

Go to > Search Twitter Bios Add the keywords (eg. travel blogger, finance advisor, etc) Click on > More options Add a location (perfect for finding local users!) ???? Profit!

» Recommended reading: Using Followerwonk to grow your Twitter account.

Mentionmapp

Explore your Twitter network through a visualization created based on the mentions you’re receiving. Discover which people engage with you the most and what topics they talk about, explore their network and recurrent interactions.

Mentionmapp is a great tool for finding relevant people to follow, don’t you think?

The underestimated Twitter Discover

You could also find interesting connections by clicking on #Discover and then visiting Activity: there you’ll find a breakdown of the latest activities of those users you’re following, including a summary of the users they have recently followed.

Foller.me

With Foller.me you’ll get rich insights about any public Twitter profile. This tool looks inside the tweets shared by the account you’ve specified and offers real-time data about popular topics and hashtags, top interactions, most linked domains and more.

I love using this app to learn more about my followers and potential followings, and discovering new sources of content that I could find interesting.

How to manage your Twitter followers and followings

In addition to organizing your followings into Twitter lists, there are also a number of tools you can start using today that will help you maximize your engagement:

Twtrland

Twtrland is an analytics tool that offers statistics on Twitter profiles such as the average of retweets and favorites an account gets, the distribution of their tweets (number of replies and mentions VS number of links they recommend VS number of checkins), their top shares, etc.

It’s a great tool to help you decide whether or not you should follow someone who has followed you, for example.

SocialBro

With SocialBro you will save a lot of time, and that’s the reason why it’s one of my favorite Twitter tools. The main dashboard shows new followers and recent unfollows, while shows useful information such as inactive Twitter users you’ve friended, people who are not following you back or whom you are not following back, etc.

Among other features, SocialBro generates a ‘best time to tweet’ report, so you can take advantage of the moment when you’ll get more retweets and replies. Pretty impressive, uh? If you add monitoring hashtags and analyzing your competitors to the mix, you’ve got one amazing tool!

TwitBlock

TwitBlock is a junk filter and bulk blocking tool for Twitter. Once you’ve allowed access to your Twitter account, TwitBlock will scan your followers for nuisance accounts and present to you a list, making it easier to block them and/or report them all in one place.

Crowdbooster

Another analytics tool -I know-, but this one will do wonders maximizing your interactions and Twitter usage. Crowdbooster’s dashboard provides data such as audience growth, reach and engagement metrics, content scheduling, targeted recommendations, and weekly account summaries for one Twitter account and one Facebook Page.

» Recommended reading: Crowdbooster review: social analytics & optimization.

How to find, manage and share fresh and “retweetable” content

The following tools will help you discover great content without having to spend all day reading blog after blog:

Curate.Me

Curate.Me delivers personalized news to your email inbox based on your interests and data mined from your favorite social networks and news sources. Of course, an automated tool such as this one might serve up things you’ve already read but it’s always a good idea to receive the top tweets and shares of the day, just in case you’ve missed something.

Trapit

AI-powered curation tool that learns from your tastes and continues to deliver on topic content as your tastes evolve. Once you’ve created your “Traps”, this service will capture what you want and serve it up to your inbox, quite a timesaver!

Trapit is the sister company of Apple’s Siri, so you know that there’s some awesome technology there: the AI will get smarter as you train it and their iPad app is pretty cool.

Inbound.org

If you’re a redditor like me, you probably know that the subreddits dedicated to SEO, social media and web marketing are really poor. Inbound.org created a space where designers, bloggers, web developers, PRs and marketers can share and discuss content as well as useful tools.

» Recommended reading: Top 10 Inbound.org contributors and why you should follow them.

Revisit

Revisit is a real–time visualization of tweets around a specific topic. This tool aligns all Twitter messages for your search terms along a timeline, and those tweets that receive more attention –a.k.a. retweets or @replies– are displayed larger.

Easy and quite graphic way of finding retweetable content around a topic of your interest!

How to improve your productivity and efficiency on Twitter

We’ve already discussed which tools you could use for finding interesting profiles to follow, managing your contacts and discovering the best content you could share. Now it’s time to talk about the options you have for improving the way in which you use your Twitter account on a daily basis.

Tweet Old Post

This WordPress plugin connects to your Twitter account and automatically tweets out links to your past blog posts. Tweet Old Post is highly customizable, very simple and free of charge.

If This Then That (IFTTT)

Ifttt connects any two Web services together with one simple statement: if this Trigger then that Action. For example, if you take a picture with Instagram (Trigger) you can automatically save it to Dropbox (Action), and this would be one of your Personal Recipes.

Twitter is one of the channels you can work with, creating recipes such as:

Twitter Recipe 1: If I star an item in Google Reader, then automatically Add it as a tweet to my Buffer.

Twitter Recipe 2: If I favourite a tweet, then save it to my Pocket so that I can read it later.

Twitter Recipe 3: If I publish a new blog post, then automatically publish it as a tweet.

TweetReach

Always wondered how far do your tweets travel? With TweetReach you will be able to answer this question.

You can drop in any URL and the app will display who has tweeted it, how many people saw it, who those people are and at what time they were sharing the article the most.

Buffer

Buffer lets you schedule tweets, ensuring important shares go out when they will make the most impact. Connect one Facebook page, one Twitter account and one LinkedIn account for free, and schedule posts from whatever page you’re on with a Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Safari extension. Don’t forget to take a look at Buffer’s apps and extras!

Rapportive

A Gmail add-on that displays useful information about your contacts: a photo, bio, Skype ID and links to social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc), as you email them.

In addition to this, when you open or start composing an email to someone, Rapportive will show you their latest tweets, and you can even retweet or send @replies right from inside your Gmail account!

Hootsuite

Excellent tool for keeping on top of your social media streams (and my app of choice for Twitter management). If you decide to go for it, I’d recommend you to organize who you follow into Twitter lists and then add those lists to Hootsuite as streams.

How to optimize your Twitter profile for search

The last tip would be to read my guest post on Boom’s blog: 6 SEO tips to optimize Twitter for search. I’d say one of the key points for achieving efficiency on Twitter is having the ability of being found by potential followers, instead of having to chase them down.

Can you think of any other tools, tips or tricks that would help with the day-to-day activity on Twitter?