Twitter management solutions for businesses seem to be popping up left and right now that everyone’s jumping on the band wagon. We at Magicomm have spent some time playing around with the different services out there and came up with this list, we feel, are the top 5.
CoTweet instantly became my favorite multi-account manager for Twitter. Although still in private beta, it sports a slick user interface with intuitive Twitter management. Some cool features include:
- The ability to assign Tweeps to users for follow-up
- A consolidated replies/direct messages feed for multiple accounts.
- The ability to archive tweets
- Scheduled tweets
- A little red light that notifies other users when you’re on duty
It’s a pretty solid solution with a hell of an advisory board. CoTweet easily takes my number 1 spot.
HootSuite takes the cake for best multi-account management system that is not in beta. It won “Best App” in the Shorty Awards. Besides the easy to use interface, it even has it’s own URL shortener called the “ow.ly” along with it’s own analytics. Not bad if you’re looking for a free integrated Twitter management solution.
I had to throw this one in there as it is both free and very easy to use. While you are not given the ability to associate multiple users with one account, you can manage multiple accounts under one user. I like to think of it as a simplified version of CoTweet, minus the kick ass advisory board and cool follow-up features. But SpliTweet does a good job of what it does best, monitor multiple Twitter streams and “Brand Mentions”, which is basically a Twitter search for your brand.
EasyTweets is basically a paid version of HootSuite with a couple extra features thrown in. My favorite feature is the ability to shorten URLs with the service of my choice and integrate Google Analytics parameters. Some other cool features include:
- Auto-follow
- Monitor Twitter trends
- A TweetGrid like deck view
- The ability to receive brand mentions via email
TweeLater was probably the first of all these tools to bust on the scene with their tweet scheduling service. They have since transformed themselves into a rather complete Twitter solution for businesses … and spammers. The ability to “spin text” so you can schedule tweets without being branded as spam by Twitter seems slightly dishonest however can be a huge time saver when dealing with repetitive tweets.
But you can’t overlook the massive list of features that would make it the most complete solution out there. However, one could always argue that more tools aren’t necessarily better.
