Top Three Twitter Monitoring Tools

Every year (in fact, every month), Twitter gets more important. It’s not just a simple communication tool any more. With hundreds of thousands of tweets being made every minute at the busiest times, Twitter is fast becoming a huge information resource. It’s a place to find recommendations on products and services, hunt down new customers, and get noticed by the big players in your industry.

Catching the tweets that are most relevant to you is a matter of more than just following the right people. As with any resource, you’ve got to be proactive to get the best results. That means getting out there and finding the tweets that are most valuable. They could be from people looking for services you can provide or useful industry news you don’t want to miss out on.

The most basic way to search for relevant tweets is to use the Twitter search tool. It’s incredibly popular. According to the latest figures, this sees about 19 billion queries per month. That’s not nearly as many as Google, but it’s a lot more than both Yahoo and Bing. In fact, that’s more monthly search queries than Yahoo and Bing put together, although a lot of the Twitter searches are automated.

If you don’t want to spend hours glued to Twitter (and who does) there are a range of free Twitter monitoring tools available. Here we list the top 3 Twitter monitoring software / tools available for free use. These Twitter monitoring tools will help you make the most of your Twitter account. These tools are very easy to use and present important data in easy to read and understand manner.

Monitter

Monitter is probably the simplest Twitter monitoring tool available on the internet. You just type in your search terms, give it a geographical area if you want to, and it’ll harvest relevant tweets in real time and display them on screen. Monitter allows you to watch more than one keyword at a time, and you can try it online at monitter.com without having to register or download any software. This is one of the best tools to monitor your Twitter account.

TweetBeep

Tweetbeep is a service that sends out automated notifications when your keywords come up. They can be either hourly or daily, so you won’t be irritated by a constant stream flooding your inbox. It does require registration and there is a paid premium service on offer, but the basic option is free to use. The criteria Tweetbeep uses to identify relevant tweets is quite sophisticated. It can tell you when someone tweets your URL even if they’ve shortened it with bit.ly or tinyurl, for example. TweetBeep as I said previously offers 2 versions – free and a paid service. I used the free service and monitoring quality was awesome! So if you are looking for a free Twitter account monitoring tool, TweetBeep is a good choice!

TweetEffect

Sometimes it’s useful to check just how effective your own Twitter activity is. The simplest and neatest tool for this is TweetEffect. Enter any username at tweeteffect.com and it’ll match a timeline of that user’s recent tweets with a timeline of followers lost and gained. Use it to analyse your own profile and you’ll find out which tweets got you the most followers and which ones caused people to stop following you. Enter your competitor’s username and it’ll tell you what’s worked well for them and if they’ve made any major Twitter mistakes, that will show up too.

There are dozens of other free Twitter analysis and monitoring tools available. The three mentioned above are just the tip of the iceberg, but even if you only use these ones you’ll have access to a whole heap of valuable information. They’ll help you get much more from Twitter.

Jess Spate is an independent SEO consultant working in the travel and outdoor industry. Her clients include online stores, blogs like Timeshare Partners