Twitter is a great tool for business, but if you don’t have meaningful followers and manage them, then you are just blue bird flying by yourself.

FREE Twitter contact management and directory services

The follow tools allow for businesses to easily manage their twitter accounts:

• A powerful tool for seeing which people you follow are following you back is FriendOrFollow. This tool also allows you to see which people are following you, but you have yet to follow them back.
• You may have a lot of followers, but how many of those are active? Twitoria allows you to see which of your followers are active on Twitter over the last week, two weeks, month, two months, however long you would like to see.
• WeFollow is a user-powered Twitter directory. Simply enter the tags or keywords that you want to be known for (such as #socialmedia, #marketing, #entrepreneur) and viola! you’re finished.
• Twellow, also known as the Yellow Pages of Twitter, allows you to search for users by a wide range of many categories. You can also add yourself to this directory group so people can find you easier.
• A directory service that will notify you of new additions to people in your particular industry who is just like you is Just Tweet It.

For more FREE Twitter tips, click here. Also, stay tuned for Twitter marketing tools. Know someone who is clueless when it comes to social media? Maybe you? For under 10 bucks, you can change that. We’ve put together a simple and powerful Ta-Do list for social media.

Save time. Get more followers. Earn more impact.
For those of you who are always tweeting, the following management tools may make your life seem easier and will aid in growing your community and channel significance:

1.     TweetDeck is a free desktop widget that allows a business to tweet with the ability to sort tweets into direct messages, topics and keywords. TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that lets users send and receive tweets and view account profiles. You can also set up a specific column to view mentions of your company or industry, and another column for all of your competitors. This application is also capable of integrating your Facebook, Linkedin, Google Buzz, Foursquare and Myspace accounts.

2.      Hootsuite is a free fast-growing web service and is designed for businesses needing to manage more than one Twitter profile with multiple users. It allows a business to easily schedule tweets and easily switch back and forth between different accounts. Hootsuite also includes a URL-shortening service that lets you see how many times your links are clicked.

3.      CoTweet is a free tool that allows multiple individuals from the same company communicate through a single Twitter account. People maintain their own profile and the account activity is recorded as the program focuses on a two-way communication that engages other accounts.

The next blog post will discuss different contact management tools.

Unless you are new to social media, you should already know about Twitter and should know that it is an easy way for businesses to get closer to their customers for free. Twitter is a cost effective way to build a community and brand awareness. I highly recommend creating a Twitter account for your business if you have not yet done so. But if you already have, and are interested in improving the use of your Twitter account, here are 5 free tips to follow:

1. Things to consider tweeting about
When you tweet, don’t forget to mention your Facebook and Linkedin accounts. Followers may want to be apart of your other social portals and vice versa. Doing this will easily grow your audience. Tweeting, or giving shout outs, about the your colleagues will more than likely result in your followers following them as well, thus in turn, your business will have more prime tweets towards your target market. It’s a social spiral that you shouldn’t pass up and consider implementing.

2. Twitter directories
Getting your Twitter account listed on directories is an easy way to get your name out to Twitter land. These directories are also a useful way to find followers that you are interested in following. Mashable is one of my favorite directories to use, but there are tons to choose from.

3. Tweet often, but not too often
Try not to tweet about your business more than 10 times a day. Leave time for reaction or people may unfollow you, especially if followers see that you are not retweeting the good stuff from other followers or if you’re acting like a robot and not tweeting towards your audience in a friendly, personable way. Tweeting at certain times of the day, morning and night, will increase your chances of gaining more followers, but it also depends on the hours of whom you are trying to reach.

4. Make conversation
Asking questions on your Twitter timeline is a good way to get feed back. Also, try participating and retweeting tweets from others; they will more than likely retweet the favor.  Direct messaging your followers after they begin following you is common courtesy in Twitter land, although it may be hard to keep track of whom to thank when sending out your direct messages if you gain a lot of followers in one day. Socialoomph is a free tool that automatically sends out DMs to your followers and keeps statistics of how many are sent out in a day.

5. Tweet things that are valuable
Besides tweeting about your business, your followers want to read something interesting, worth their while or something that they’ll learn from. For example, tweeting: “Find out how much your twitter is worth – http://tweetervalue.com/ I’m worth $476, how about you?” allows followers to interact with you, is interesting and fun. Real life relationships are about give and take, you can’t let everything be about yourself or it just won’t work! And in this case, you’ll lose followers.

Need more help on social media? Our Social Media Ta-Do list is packed full of all the steps to get going and social.

Other related articles worth reading.
Social media and sales
140 ways to stand out
How Twitter got me a 6-fig gig

And these new Twitter books have some sweet, tweet, ideas too.

Stay tuned for ways to manage your Twitter account.