CoTweet: Proactive marketing solution

1 CoTweet is a powerhouse for Twitter accounts when you have multiple team members tweeting. It allows for scheduling, tracking and adding notes. Nonprofits can manage up to six Twitter accounts for free using the Standard edition. The ability to track past conversations is a great utility to remind you where you stand with each contact. You can also assign specific people to on-duty status. The Enterprise edition costs about $1,500 per month and is worth it for medium to large organizations. With this edition, you can manage campaigns, assign tasks and integrate the tool with third-party apps such as Salesforce.com. On the other hand, the interface is lacking and the analytics could be better. It also allows for Facebook management.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile

MediaFunnel: The app for team tweeting

2 Media Funnel allows for more of your staff to be involved with the tweeting process. It supports multiple user types — admins, publishers, contributors and guests — and tweets can be placed in a queue for editorial review by a publisher or administrator. Scheduled tweets, brand alerts and tweets via email or SMS are supported. This tool also integrates with Salesforce.com, Zendesk, Twilio and Klout. The free plan allows for two users and no brand monitoring, while the standard plan offers many features and costs $1 per user per month or $1 per social media account, whichever is greater.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Desktop, iPhone, Android, Blackberry

Timely: Make your tweets count

3Timely analyzes your past 199 Twitter updates to determine what times during the day people are most likely to read your posts. You can schedule tweets to go live at those times and can use the bookmarklet to tweet links without leaving your current page. You can tweet right away or add the message to your queue. It’s free.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Klout: Measuring online influence

4 Klout offers a daily summary of your organization’s or team members’ social media influence, with a ranking that factors in your reach and impact on Twitter (metrics such as retweets, follower counts, list memberships, unique mentions), Facebook and LinkedIn. Klout has an open API that’s integrated into many Twitter apps: More than 750 partners use Klout data, including Hootsuite, CoTweet and Attensity 360. For the end user, its analytics platform is rich and easy to use, even if the methodology used in spitting out a Klout Score is a bit opaque.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based, iPhone (Social Score), Android

Twylah: Branded pages for your Twitter account

5Twylah creates one page that sums up your nonprofit brand. This custom page automatically organizes your tweets into topics that you tweet about most often. Users can interact on your page by retweeting and responding to messages. The biggest benefits this tool brings are for SEO. Google no longer indexes tweets, but it does index each Twylah page and the tweets within it, giving your tweets a longer life. It also offers PowerTweets, which creates a separate landing page for your tweets with other recommended messages. It’s good to use this for blog posts, but if you do it too much, you might annoy your followers.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Qwitter: Find out who unfollows you

6Qwitter lets you know when someone stops following you after your last tweet, so you can identify what might have made them unfollow you. This free tool automatically e-mails you when someone unfollows you. If you’re a nonprofit and you tweet about sports and then three people immediately unfollow you, you might want to keep your messages more on topic.
Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web Continue reading →