I get to see a lot of twitter products and software, some of it in beta version before launch, some of it just after launch. Truth be told most of them suck and only do one thing really well. Seeing how twitter has become an essential part of most websites’ marketing plans, it’s really hard to get behind a product that only does one thing well. One product, though, that I have liked and used consistently is Easytweets.
Disclosure: This isn’t a sponsored post. However I was comped a subscription to easytweets. This subscription was not based upon my giving it a positive review or, heck, even giving it a review at all. Basically the subscription came with a “if you like it and want to write about that would be great, if you don’t that’s fine too” kind of tag.
Ok now that all the preamble is out of the way, let’s get down to the program. Easytweets is a suite of twitter tools that allows you to perform high level management and functions of multiple twitter accounts. The tool is going to most useful to people who have multiple accounts or who have a lot of functionality they want to automate. In other words people who are lazy efficient.
When you log in the first thing you are brought to is a master list of all the twitter accounts you have associated with your master account (some names are redacted) and you’ll see the following/followers counts.
Clicking through to an account brings you to the tweet interface for that account. You can see it gives you the ability to tweet to multiple accounts by simply checking a box. You can shorten URL’s with most of the popular services. I use bit.ly and it works with the bit.ly API.
For me one of the most powerful parts of the tool is that it allows you to future schedule your tweets. This makes it easy to make it look like you are there when you really aren’t or to have your tweets publish during the prime viewing time. I can’t stress enough how important this aspect is.
Here’s a listing of my scheduled tweets. I can edit the time if I want or delete the tweets entirely.
The other items in the top work as expected: DM’s shows your DM’s, replies shows your @’s, and so on.
The followers link is pretty interesting. It graphs your followers, gives you some stats, and gives you the ability to unfollow people you’re following who aren’t following you back. Not my thing, but I know lots of folks use it.
Just for kicks, the above is what an organic follower growth looks like. Here is a graph of an account with a lot more automation. Notice how it’s a lot more spiky.
You can also set up Easytweets to do some automated tasks like monitor for tweets about your name, company, product name, service, or any other keyword and send you alerts about it.
Here are some of the in-depth controls and settings you have for the searches.
The auto-follow is a nice feature for accounts that are new and starting to grow.
However the one part of easytweets I use the most is the bookmarklet. If I’m on the web and see something I’d like to tweet, I hit the bookmarket, a dialog box pops out and lets me choose an account, and I enter a message and schedule the tweet. You can see I’ve got < 140 characters because it takes care of the bit.ly URL shortening for me …
Enough of the feature talk. So how do I use easytweets on a day to day basis to make me more productive?
- When I have my blog posts scheduled to go I’ll preview them in a browser window and use the easytweets bookmarklet to schedule a tweet after publication. I can do it for more than one account and in different time zones to maximize exposure.
- If I’m pushing a social story, I can schedule a tweet from one account then also schedule retweets in other accounts, which saves me from having to sit in front of the computer and make things happen in real time.
- I cruise thru my RSS reader in the morning and find interesting stories. Rather than tweet them out all at once, I can schedule them throughout the day. This way I catch different users and don’t just dump things out all at once.
- I set up searches for keywords and autofollow people. If I do a good job targeting the right keywords I can get a decent growth in followers.
- I set up searches for each account’s name with an email report every day. I can log in and respond to replies as needed rather than constantly monitoring accounts throughout the day.
If you are the kind of person who needs up to the minute real time updates, you may have issues with easytweets. I’ve found it to usually be about 5-10 minutes behind real time. However if you are the kind of person who values their time and wants to get maximum value with minimum investment then easytweets will have value for you.
If you are someone who has less then 3 accounts to manage, easytweets is probably overkill for you. If you are the kind of person who runs multiple accounts of their own or clients and wants a single interface that lets you get things done quickly and easily, then easytweets will help you get the job done quickly and easily.
If you are the kind of person who only wants real time live interaction, easytweets is probably not the interface for you. If you are someone who likes to schedule tweets, retweets, or batch their work at a computer so they can spend the afternoon napping deep in research then easytweets is for you.
Disclosure: This was not a sponsored post; however, I was comped a subscription to easytweets. A positive review was not required or incentivized in any way.
To be completely honest I felt all of the links to easytweets should be straight up; however, we live in a world where the evil overlords rule from bean bag chairs bathed in the warm glow from lava lamps and SEO’s are profiled as criminals, so I’m forced to play by their rules.
photo credit: Robert S. Donovan
This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.
Easytweets Review
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Easytweets Review
. There will be some cross posting but I will keep it to a minimum, there will be more links there that aren’t in the main account. Give it a week and let me know what you think.
