Twitter has become an increasingly powerful device for small businesses, allowing them to engage with clients, reach a wider audience and spread brand awareness. Although Twitter is useful on its own, there are a number of tools available to help small businesses get the most from the social networking site. These tools range from those allowing you to schedule and track tweets, analyse competitor profiles, increase your followers and manage several accounts.

Here we look at 15 of the best Twitter tools your business should be using:

1. Hootsuite: Ideal for those using multiple Twitter accounts, it allows you to manage a number of accounts, schedule tweets and track brand mentions.
2. TweetDeck: A Twitter management tool, TweetDeck also gives you the option of organising followers into groups, helpful when creating customised marketing communication.
3. SocialOomph: This dashboard application allows you to manage accounts and prides itself on being efficient.
4. Topsy: With a searchable archive of over 450 billion tweets dating back to the beginning of Twitter, this tool offers valuable insight into public opinion.
5. TweetReach: This tool helps you keep track of how many people saw your tweet and who these people are, making it easier to manage and analyse Twitter campaigns.
6. Tweriod: By analysing both yours and your followers’ tweets this tool helps you determine what the best times to tweet are.
7. Klout: The tool works out your account’s popularity by giving it a score out of 100, it also gives you the opportunity to view a number of stats relating to your account.
8. Twitter Counter: Providing statistics on Twitter usage, this application helps you keep track of how your account is performing.
9. TweetAdder: Helping you increase your number of followers by up to 50-150 a day this tool ensures that your tweets reach a wider audience thus increasing brand visibility.
10. Followerwonk: Perfect for sizing up the competition, Followerwonk enables you to compare and contrast your Twitter account with those of your competitors.
11. Twitonomy: An analytics app, it allows you to track conversions, clicks and follower growth as well as monitor tweets from other users and perform keyword research.
12. Buffer: Buffer lets you line up content and then automatically posts it for you throughout the day. Scheduling posts is a great way to keep up your Twitter presence but without the fuss.
13. Twitalyzer: This application allows you to deep-dive into statistics and presents data in a variety of easy to digest graphs and charts.
14. Twtrland: This application not only helps to increase your network but it also gives you a greater understanding of other people’s impact on Twitter, useful for looking at competitors.
15. SocialMention: Allowing you to track and measure what people are saying about a brand, product or company, this app helps give an insight into popular opinion.

Using one or more of these tools could prove extremely beneficial to your small business by giving you a greater insight into followers and competitors and making your Twitter use more efficient and effective.

About the Author: This article was written exclusively for SMB CEO by Matt Russell of WebHostingBuzz.com a world-class web hosting company.

Photo credit: Ilse