10 Free Twitter Apps and Tools for Small Business

If you use Twitter for marketing (and you should, or you’re missing a huge opportunity to connect with existing customers, prospective customers, and influencers), then you know there are a few drawbacks to it: Twitter can take up a lot of time, and it can be difficult to measure the results of your efforts.

Fortunately, there are many free Twitter apps that can help you streamline the service, enhance marketing, and track your performance. Here are 15 of the most useful Twitter apps for small businesses we’ve found.

1. Localtweeps (free)
You can list yourself and search for other Twitter users on Localtweeps by keyword, city, or ZIP code. It’s a great tool to find local customers and join conversations related to your business. You can also list and hype your small business events and announce promotions on Localtweeps.

2. TwellowHood (free, pictured)
TwellowHood is part of Twellow, something of the Yellow Pages of Twitter. You can add your own listing on Twellow and search for other listings using hundreds of different search options. TwellowHood offers a visual map of Twellow listings, so you can find other Twitter users by location. It’s a great way to find prospective local customers as well as influential people in your local area who are on Twitter.

3. Nearby Tweets (free)
Nearby Tweets allows you to search actual tweets by keyword and location. This helps you find people in your local area who are tweeting about you, your business, your products, your industry, and so on.

4. MuckRack (free)
You can use MuckRack to find journalists in your area who use Twitter and connect with them. You can then offer your expertise as a resource for future stories or contact them when you have a newsworthy story that you want to share.

5. TweetChat (free)
TweetChat makes it easy to find, follow, and join real-time tweet chats happening between Twitter users about specific topics. Simply create a free account and enter the hashtag you want to follow.

6. Twitterfeed (free)
Want your blog posts to publish automatically to your Twitter and Facebook accounts? You can set it up in minutes with Twitterfeed.

7. TwitterCounter (free)
TwitterCounter offers a Twitter widget that you can place on your blog or website. It displays recent Twitter users who visit your website or blog (with their recent tweets) and lets you quickly follow them on Twitter without leaving your website or blog. TwitterCounter also offers premium features for a fee that provide statistics related to your Twitter account performance.

8. Cotweet (free)
If multiple employees publish updates to your small business Twitter profile, then Cotweet can make the process more efficient by allowing multiple people to access and tweet to your Twitter profile through separate Cotweet profiles. You can track their activities using Cotweet, too.

9. Seesmic (free)
Seesmic makes it easy for you to manage multiple Twitter and social networking accounts from the web, mobile devices, or your desktop. It also provides some performance statistics.

10. twtQpon (free)
You can create coupons for your small business and share them on Twitter using twtQpon. You can use them to promote special sales and discounts as well as reward your loyal Twitter followers. The app is free but paid versions offer more features if the free version isn’t enough for you.

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How to Use Pinterest ?

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Pinterest. It's the best thing since sliced bread. OK, lies. It's better than sliced bread. On Pinterest you virtually" pin" pictures associated with links to the best ideas and products in every corner of the web. You can find great new sites, organize them on your pin boards, and share your own products across a platform driven by a female audience (the buyers of the world!). Sounds pretty perfect, right? Now, you just have to learn how to get the most out of this site.

How can you use Pinterest to your advantage? Consider this Pinterest 101.

Find great people and brands to follow. Link up your account to Facebook or Twitter, and Pinterest will have some suggestions for who you should follow based on your other social-media habits. From there, find other pinners who have similar interests for great ideas. At the top of your homepage, check out the categories under "Everything" to find a mishmash of ideas and links floating around Pinterest at any given moment. In your feed, if a friend repins a link to a site with a great idea, trail the person or brand that initially pinned it. From there you can find cool folks to follow, or even individual boards so you don't clog your stream with too much information.

Organizational skills. Clearly label your boards. While it may be fun to name them hilarious things like "my brother smells," other pinners who stumble upon your content need to easily see what you, or your brand, is all about. They're more likely to follow you if your board is labeled "Style Inspiration" or "Runway" rather than "Cool Stuff" and "Awesomeness." …See what I mean? That could mean anything.

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Get repins, get followers. The best ways to nab followers? Put a button on your blog to show visitors you're on Pinterest. Repin the best links. Seasonal items are always favorites (because everyone wants flat-ab workouts to look fab in their cute, new swimsuits, and we all need easy Super Bowl recipe ideas). Pin blazing-hot topics: the ones with lots of likes and comments are a good place to start. Try to think about what other people would find relevant and repin.

SEO, baby. Use keywords in the names of your boards and the items you pin to make your content SEO-rich and pick up more followers. Pinning a yellow-blazer-and-skinnies look to your "Style" board? Make sure to caption the pin with words like "blazer," "style," "jeans," and "denim" so Pinterest will pick your pin up in the search results.

Avoid spam. As Pinterest continues to expand, so does the number of spammers invading feeds and creating boards. This is how they work their ugly magic: They'll pin a cool photo, and link to a completely unrelated website in efforts to grab your attention or information. Don't fall for it! Pinterest has no ads, and does not support giveaways, so if the pin promises free Coldstone ice cream or a trip to Vegas, don't click. Never give out login information. And if you do click on a link that turns out to be spam, just backtrack to Pinterest and report the spammer. For more details on nixing these spammers, check out Pinterest's note on fighting spam.

Pin productively. Resist the urge to pin everything in sight, and really strategize. Pin your own products and links as a marketing tool - people will find you through Pinterest if you have great content, which you obviously do - but don't pin only your content. Pin other people's links relevant to your niche, and other items and nuggets you think your audience would find interesting. Basically: Be useful to your followers. And always, always make sure what you pin links back to an actual site. Pinning a gorgeous, curly updo with no link to a tutorial explaining how to recreate it? Huge pet peeve. Grrrr…

Simplify. Great photography. Streamlined boards. Easy-to-understand pins. Keep it simple, keep it straightforward, and don't get overly fancy. The best pins are eye-catching and recognizable, so pin images and links that your followers don't have to wonder about or look into. The best pinners make the process fun by making it simple.

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Use "Like" as a placeholder. This tip comes from Blogging with Amy, and it's a good one! Your followers probably won't appreciate you flooding their streams with pin after pin. They can only look at so much at once, yes? So before pinning yet another link about pastel pants, "Like" it instead. It will be filed there, instead of on a board, and won't pop up for your followers to see. You can go back later and reassess to see if it's actually worth pinning.

Price-tag it. If you're selling products, or just come across a great find, and want to add an item to Pinterest for your followers to check out (and share, too!), add a price banner to the corner of the photo. Simply type out the value within the caption, like "Floral top, $59." Great prices will entice buyers, and also allow for potential shoppers to budget your piece onto their "Must-Have" boards. Oh, and want to let another pinner know about whatcha found? Similar to Twitter,

See who's pinning you. Want to know what lovely people are pinning content from your site? Use this nifty trick to keep track: Pinterest.com/source/you.com. (Just stick your site name in there instead of "you.com," - presto.) You may just want to know what's popular on your site, but these pinners may also be shoppers and other folks you want to mingle with.

What makes Pinterest so pinteresting?

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to your Facebook wall. You can also embed pins onto your website or email them to a friend.
12 Tips to Pinterest Your Nonprofit’s Interest

1. Create Pinterest boards with a specific purpose in mind. Example: good stuffs.

1. Follow Pinterest users with similar interests with quality pins on their boards, like, Nonprofit Organizations.  

1. Follow back influential people who follow you. The trick is to click “Follow All” on the individual’s profile, then unfollow specific boards that aren’t of interests to you.

1. “Like” pins or repin items that appeals to you. This action will show up on the user’s sidebar. It will also send an email notification to the user (if turned on).

1. Use the pin comments section to engage in conversation and leave your mark.

1. Collaborate with co-workers or team members to help build your Pinterest board by using the board edit feature “Me + Contributors.” Let’s say your organization has a project to build a house. You can call the board “The House That Love Built” and invite team leaders to post photos of tools needed, progress of the build, and volunteers.

1. Use eye-catching images to get people’s attention and repins. The more repins, the more chances you’ll have people clicking to the source website.

1. Create an online fundraising catalog. Add “$” symbol and the amount of an item in the pin description, i.e., $7.95 or $5.00. A grey banner with the price will be displayed on the upper left corner. Your pin will automatically go into the gifts tab located at the top of the homepage.

1. Use the search box by typing in topics, people’s names, businesses, etc. Then filter search by clicking pins, boards, or people.

1. Use the @ feature in the comment box to tag specific people (like other social networks).

1. Use keywords to name your Pinterest boards, board descriptions, and pin descriptions for search engine optimization (SEO).

1. Add a Pinterest share button to your website and URL on your business cards.

Pinterest Resources:

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Avi Kaplan Steal These 42 Creative Pinterest Ideas for Nonprofts
LinchpinSEO [INFOGRAPHIC] Ideas For Marketing Your Products Using Pinterest.Com
Bcause Media delicious Pinterest Guide and Resources
Kelly Lieberman Scoop.it Pinterest

Pinterest can generate a lot of traffic to your website because pins link back to their original source. For example, if you pin an image of a product from your business’ website onto your Pinterest board and a person clicks on the image, they will be directed back to your website (huge SEO bonus points).

Social broadcasting by repinning other user’s images in Pinterest, tweet pins to Twitter and “like” pins

You can pin videos too

Women, who  are usually the retail buyers in a household, have flocked to Pinterest to share decorating ideas, crafts, cooking recipes, bargain products and much, much more.

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What I like most about Pinterest is that it’s visually-appealing and easy to use. If I’m perusing the web and I come across a really cool image, I can “pin” the image to my Pinterest board. Like creating my very own lifestyle catalog with the things I’m interested in.Plus, all of my friends can see what appeals to me, which is useful when buying gifts (hint, hint).

Tip: If you highlight the web context with the left button of your mouse, then click the “Pin it” button, the highlighted text will show up in the Pinterest description box.

Like the other social media networks, Pinterest is not a place to blatantly promote your organization. You will turn people away if you constantly push your cause. Instead, pin images that capture the lifestyle and essence of your organization while building a community of potential donors and volunteers who share the same interests.

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How to Turn On the New Twitter Profile Layout

Out with the old, in with the… familiar? Among the slew of new products unveiled by Twitter — including revamped iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch and Android apps — is a design change for the website profile that’s pretty reminiscent of Facebook’s Timeline layout.

The new look being rolled out for user profile pages puts more emphasis on photos, with a widget on the left that displays even more recent images and a larger main header pic on the right.

Interested in taking the new design for a whirl? Here’s how to activate it:

Log into your Twitter profile, tap the gear icon and pick Settings from the drop-down list. Then select the Design setting (on the left). You’ll see the “Pick a premade theme” option first, but below that is “Customize your own.” (You may have to scroll down.)

This is where you’ll be able to tweak your header or background. Hit the “Change header” button and upload an image. It should be at least 1252 x 626, for the best quality, with a file size no bigger than 5MB.

Commitphobic? You don’t have to stick with this look; just go back into the settings and ditch the header pic or swap it out for a new one.

Have you given the new Twitter layout a try? Let us know if you love it or not in the comments.

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Twitter Crosses 100 Million Active-User Milestone

twitter has a long way to go before its micro-blogging service  catches up with Facebook, but the social-media darling just crossed another milestone: 100 million active users, and in only five years.

Twitter reports that more than half of those 100 million active users log on every day to follow their interests. In other words, Twitter isn't all about sending 140-character posts. Many sign in just to eavesdrop on what's happening around the world in their areas of interest.

"Twitter's global reach gives a voice  to people around the world and as far away as the International Space Station," Twitter said in a blog post. "After launching Hindi, Filipino, Malay and Simplified and Traditional Chinese in the coming weeks, Twitter will support  17 different languages."

Twitter's Shrewd Moves

To its credit, Twitter shrewdly opened its API so that companies of all sizes -- most notably media organizations -- could tweet articles and blog posts and, most recently, follow accounts without having to leave the web page they are on, said Jake Wengroff, global director of social media strategy and research at Frost & Sullivan. 

"Twitter also allowed for the creation of thousands of Twitter companion products and applications, including mobile  clients, increasing its reach exponentially. This move, however, is being reconsidered: Twitter has made several big moves of late to rein in the ownership of its product, platform, and brand," Wengroff said.

"In May 2011, Twitter purchased TweetDeck, one of the largest social media engagement platforms, for $40 million, and soon after rolled out its own URL-shortening and photo-upload services, ostensibly to wrest usage away from third-party apps."

Twitter VIPs

Choosing to focus more on trends than controversy, Twitter went on in its announcement to break down some of its more notable users. It turns out that 35 global heads of state use Twitter, including 84 percent of U.S. governors and every major presidential candidate. And more than 40 percent of what Twitter has classified as "top global religious leaders" are on Twitter, including @DalaiLama and the Pope, who sent his first Tweet from @news_va_en in June.

Beyond religion, humanitarians are also aboard the Twitter bandwagon -- 99 percent of America's top 200 nonprofits to be exact. Twitter noted the Red Cross's recent response to Hurricane Irene -- @redcross -- signed up lists of official volunteers to assist in four-hour shifts to disseminate the latest information to those affected by the storm. 

On the athletic front, every team in the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and MLS tweets. Two-thirds of NBA players are on Twitter.

Entertainers are a given for the micro-blogging service. Eighty-seven percent of Billboard's Top 100 musicians of 2010 are active on Twitter, along with each of the top 50 Nielsen-rated TV shows and plenty of comedians.

Of course, no numerical survey of Twitter would be complete without a look at how reporters are using Twitter. After all, there's been so much talk about how citizen journalists are beating traditional reporters to the punch.

Major newsrooms from @AJEnglish to @WashingtonPost actively use Twitter to supplement their reporting efforts, Twitter noted. And ordinary citizens break news, like the now-famous Space Shuttle image that was retweeted over 2,300 times, and the first photo of the US Airways plane that landed in the Hudson River in 2009.

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Twitter Pushes Congress toward Debt Ceiling Deal

In his second televised appeal of the week, President Barack Obama on Friday urged Americans to take to the Internet to push their lawmakers toward a debt ceiling compromise. 

“So please, to all the American people, keep it up,” the president said. “If you want to see a bipartisan compromise — a bill that can pass both houses of Congress and that I can sign — let your members of Congress know.” 

The president suggested Twitter as a means of interaction between the citizens and their lawmakers to urge them to make a deal. And tweet they did — so much that the White House credits the social networking site for Congress’ recently announced debt ceiling agreement. 

According to a Twitter conversation last night between White HouseCommunications Director Dan Pfeiffer and New York Times reporter Brain Stelter, the White House believes the public’s tweets helped push Congress toward a debt ceiling agreement. 

“Comm. Director Dan Pfeiffer affirms that the WH believes emails/tweets helped pressure Congress to act,” read Stelter’s tweet. 

Following the president’s national address, Americans took to the phone lines and the Internet to contact their lawmakers. Telephone circuits in the Capitol were overwhelmed by a high volume of incoming calls while Twitter exploded with messages aimed at representatives. 

The president also made use of the site. Tweeting his 9.4 million followers, Obama asked them to use the hashtag, #compromise.

“The time for putting party first is over. If you want to see a bipartisan #compromise, let Congress know. Call. Email. Tweet.-BO,” he said.

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Hacker launches volunteer program for security professionals

Renowned hacker Johnny Long drums up support for his Hackers for Charity nonprofit and announces a new InfoSec without Borders program at DefCon.

(Credit: Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

LAS VEGAS--Johnny Long used to be known for Google hacking--finding vulnerable servers on the Internet using specific search terms. Now he's helping humanitarian groups, street kids, and police in Uganda learn how to use computers and keep malicious hackers out of their systems, as well as matching other information security professionals to charities that need help.

Long, who started the Hackers for Charity nonprofit in 2008, launched a new program at the DefCon hacker conference here this weekend that he's calling InfoSec without Borders and which is modeled after the Doctors Without Borders program.

"The volunteers are professionals in the industry now and they have a corporate responsibility" and want to help communities in need, he said. "We want to help guide that by feeding in charities that we screen."

Long's nonprofit provides free computer training to anyone who wants it, fixes computers, provides technical support to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and has fed thousands of families through its "food for work" program.

"We've trained street kids, the Ugandan police, government officials, Red Cross workers. We're trying to raise the level of technical ability to provide not only a service, but jobs," he said in an interview yesterday. "We have given computer training to lots of people who had absolutely no background in it. Now they have jobs and are doing things like word processing, office reception...and that kind of work is very well paid because the pool of resources there is so small."

Hackers for Charity has 30 employees and thousands of volunteers all over the world. "We've been fully embraced by the hacker community," he said, adding that the majority of the group's funding comes from hackers.

For many people, the word "hacker" conjures up images of underground criminals who break into databases and steal credit card data or the Anonymous and LulzSec groups that are really online activists described by veteran hackers as "script kiddies" who use automated tools and other less sophisticated techniques to find and exploit holes in software. But a true hacker is driven by intellectual curiosity and a challenge and has a desire to master technology and find new uses for it.

In Uganda, there's a new definition as a result of Long's work.

"The definition of 'hacker' in areas we work in Uganda has changed to 'aid worker,'" Long said. "They don't have the idea that hackers are criminals. They see us as computer wizard aid workers. That's one of the underlying things I wanted to accomplish with Hackers for Charity, to change the perception. We had been labeled as a criminal community and it's not fair."

In the 1990s, Long worked at Computer Sciences Corporation and created its Strike Force vulnerability assessment team. While there he specialized in using Google to find servers that are vulnerable to attack, sites exposing sensitive data like Social Security numbers and passwords and other things companies wouldn't want accessible via a search engine query.

After his wife went on a mission (they are both Christians) to Uganda in 2006 and shared what she had seen, Long went there and did volunteer computer repair work for an NGO whose virus-laden computer system was "a mess" and was hindering the organization's ability to keep track of contributions and be productive.

"The impact was immediate. The NGO was on the ground and up and running in two weeks, and feeding children the day we left. The last thing they said to us was 'you saved lives,'" he said. "That absolutely struck me and when I got back to the real world it was all I could think about. I wanted to use that platform to get people plugged in to that feeling of doing something positive, and to offer a positive path for hackers."

"It's hactivism by definition," Long said. "It's using technology to create social change, but it's the first example of positive hactivism I've seen."

Asked if people participating in online activism organized by the Anonymous group were hactivists, Long said: "It depends on the results of what they're doing. With Sony's site going down, you can see the immediate effect of their actions. But as to the social change, the political influence that they have, how do you measure that? A successful hactivist will be able to measure both. Personally, I have trouble seeing that impact."

Hackers for Charity is based in Jinja, which is a "stone's throw from the source of the Nile" and the second largest town in Uganda. Long's family runs a restaurant catering to Western tastes of tourists who might want a change from the typical fare of goat milk and rice. Visitors "will have a milkshake and cheeseburger and they'll drop off their laptop for a $20 repair," he said.

A lot of people are poor and turn to crime to survive. Long's family--including his three children ranging in age from nine to 15--live in a gated compound with barbed wire and an armed guard. "We have bars on every window and gates on every door," he said.

Most of the crime in Uganda is theft, he said. Computer security is practically non-existent, and that combined with the poverty is driving criminals online, according to Long, who is helping educate the Ugandan police on how to investigate everything from financial and bank fraud to credit card skimming and online scams.

"Criminals see this as a sand box to play in," he said. In addition to the work Hackers for Charity does, Long also works teaching the police about information security and connecting them to experts in the U.S. "It's basic training with the police there that can lead to training in things like forensics, he said. "We can work on cases, but we're also bringing up a generation of cyber cops in a place that has almost no infrastructure. It's unique."

Long is worried that Uganda could become another Nigeria, which is known in the online world as the birthplace of the Nigerian scam or "advance fee fraud," which features e-mails from a "barrister" who claims to be unable to access a large sum of unclaimed money without access to a bank account in a western country and offers a percentage of the money for help. By offering free computer training and other help Long hopes to help break the cycle of poverty without people having to become online thieves.

"If something doesn't change Uganda will become another Nigeria in the sense that criminals will take advantage of the technology first," he said. "We're trying to head that off as best we can."

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Twitter Ads Will Now Show Up in the Timeline

Twitter said on Thursday that ads from companies, known as Promoted Tweets, will now show up at or near the top of users’ timelines.

Twitter introduced Promoted Tweets more than a year ago, but so far they have only shown up when people search Twitter for relevant keywords. When someone searches “movie,” for instance, the top post is sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, advertising its TouchPad and MovieStore app.

Now those types of paid Twitter posts will show up in users’ main Twitter streams, if the user already follows the company or organization. Twitter says that the ads will appear only once, and can be easily removed by clicking the word “dismiss” below the post.

Twitter had 400 million unique visitors to its site last month, according to the company, not counting the other ways that people access Twitter, such as through cellphone apps. But it is still experimenting with how to make money off all those visits. In addition to Promoted Tweets, Twitter sells two other kinds of ads — Promoted Trends, which show up in the list of trending topics, and Promoted Accounts, which show up in the list of whom to follow.

“When we decide to follow a favorite brand, business or charitable organization, we expect to be among the first to get a special announcement, access to exclusive content or a great offer,” Twitter wrote in a company blog post. “That’s why starting today, we’re introducing a way to ensure that the most important tweets from the organizations you follow reach you directly.”

Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief executive, said last week at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference that the number of advertisers, which was in the low hundreds last year, had increased sevenfold, and that 80 percent of brands renew their campaigns.

“Along any axis you want to measure the financial health of the company, it’s going according to plan,” Mr. Costolo said at the conference, held in Aspen, Colo. “This ability to edit and manage a campaign in real time as it happens has never existed globally before.”

Initial advertisers for in-stream ads include Dell, Gatorade, Best Western, JetBlue and Starbucks. Twitter will also show Promoted Tweets from some nonprofit organizations that users follow.

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Time to reach 20 million users... facebook .google. twitter

"I've never seen anything grow this quickly," said Andrew Lipsman, vice president of industry analysis at comScore. The only other site that has accumulated as many new visitors in a short period of time is Twitter in 2009, he said, "but that happened over several months."

...Of course, Google has a long way to go to reach the scale of Facebook Inc., which has more than 750 million users, and Twitter Inc., which has more than 200 million registered accounts...

...Google+ also has unique technology, such as a "hangouts" feature, that lets people do "video chats" using their computer webcams, speaking to numerous friends simultaneously. The company plans to include Google+ in its suite of online software for businesses...

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