BudURL: Best Twitter Tools for URL Shortening

BudURL shortener for campaign management

BudURL - Twitter tool for URL shortening

With only 140 characters available to work with, you have to shorten your URLs when you want to include links in your posts. There are many serviceable URL shorteners around, but why not try one that collects detailed statistics about the traffic around you? One of the best Twitter tools for URL shortening is BudURL.

The Basics
BudURL offers Twitter integration and a short domain name. You not only shrink a long URL, you can add notes and tags as well. Thanks to a clean, intuitive interface, managing your links is a simple task. You can schedule tweets for multiple accounts. BudURL also offers two bookmarklets to simplify tweeting.

Statistics and Analytics
This is where the application really shines. You can view real-time click statistics on each link along with detailed analytics. You can search multiple accounts using many labels and keywords. Your dashboard displays referrers and daily click totals in easy to read charts. This tells you not only how much activity your links are generating, but lets you know which social media platforms are the most active.

More Features
BudURL also provides a visual on your link activity. It displays a list of the retweets of your tweet and link. It also ties in mobile devices with QR codes. Their mobile landing pages make creating a mobile marketing strategy a snap. The Geo-IP data identifies location details for cities, regions and countries. This provides valuable geographic insight that can benefit your marketing strategy.

BudURL is a great way to shorten your links and analyze their reach. There are many applications to measure website traffic; this tool captures and measures your social network traffic. The site offers three premium packages for users, so you can find the perfect fit for your business. This is definitely one of the best Twitter tools available for URL shortening.

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Five Practical Twitter Search Tools

Trendistic search tool

Trendistic is one of the best Twitter search tools for specialized searches




Twitter is a great place to communicate and connect, but the sheer volume of data can sometimes be overwhelming. Fortunately, there are a number of great Twitter search tools available. Here is a brief synopsis of five of them.

The Twitter Search tool is a great place to start. Just type who or what you are looking for in the search box at the top of your Twitter page. You can add most of the same operators you use with a web search engine, such as quotes, OR and -. You can also search by hashtag. To save a search, just click the save search box. To retrieve a search later, use the search dropdown box on the timeline.

Snap Bird comes at searching from a slightly different perspective. You can’t access the public timeline, but you can search any user’s tweet stream as well as their favorites, tweets that mention you, and direct messages. Snap Bird stands out as one of the best free Twitter tools for searching back more than 10 days, which is the limit on Twitter search.

Summizer is a Twitter search tool for the iPhone with a clean interface. It scans the Twitter stream in real time and automatically updates your saved searches. Summizer uses the same advanced operators as Twitter search, so you can drill down to the data you want. Foreign language tweets are translated and you can share your searches by tweet and email.

TweetSaver allows you to search back through your own tweets. If you open a tweet, you can tag it or share it. Tags appear in a tag cloud, so you can further refine your search. Click the share button and increase your productivity by sending the tweet to one of your social media sites. The free plan saves the 3200 most recent tweets. If you need more storage than that, premium plans are available, with a discount for tweeting about TweetSaver.

Trendistic lets you search tweets by date and time. Enter your search term, then choose a day within the past week. To refine your search you can click on the time of day. This application is somewhat limited in scope, but if you want to drill down by time of tweet, this is a handy tool to have.

All desktop clients provide some sort of search feature, but not everyone wants to bother with a dashboard. If all you want is a quick search, these are some of the best (and often free) Twitter search tools get the job done.

What tool are you using to search through Twitter? Leave us a comment in the box below.

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How to Use Twitter to Announce Events

BigMapple

Use BigMapple to announce events in New York City

Whether it’s a birthday party for the wife, a grand opening, or a new product roll out, Twitter is rapidly becoming the way to announce and invite. You could simply send out 140 characters to announce your event, or you could do so much more. Here are five tools that can help you learn how to use Twitter to announce events.

TaWidget lets you create a customized widget announcing your events, and provides the code you need to add the button to your website or blog. TaWidget integrates with the events calendar Taweet, which publishes your Twitter posts including a description and the starting date and time.

DailyMile is a social media training log for athletes. One of its many features is an events page. You can search for functions to participate in, categorized by running, triathlon, or cycling. If you are planning an event, add it to the page including a location. DailyMile is supported by Google Maps, so you can pinpoint the locale and publish the route in advance of the meet.

BigMapple is dedicated to the 5 boroughs of New York City. Add an event to show other New Yorkers what is happening in your neighborhood. Once the party starts, people can add tweets and photos. Search by address to check out the action in the area you’re in. This is a boon to the NYC community.

PlanCast is where people and plans come together. This social media calendar is easy to use and easy to search. Adding an event is a snap; just answer what, when and where. You can even invite some of your friends to attend. If you’re looking for things to do, you can explore by category and location.

Hooopla is an Android application designed to announce events on the spur of the moment. Just create, share, and enjoy. After all, you’re not always sitting at home waiting for an invite. The newsfeed range can be set to global, or zero in on a 5 mile radius.

Upcoming events can be as frivolous as a pillow fight, or as newsworthy as a major press conference. Getting the word out is an important part of the success of any gathering. Once you learn how to use Twitter to announce events, you can relax, knowing your event planning is right on track.

If you use any of these Twitter tools, tell us what you think about them by adding your comments.

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How to Use Trending Topics on Twitter

Twittorati home page

Twittorati helps users track trending topics

Have you ever tried to figure out what people are talking about the most on social media sites? Trending topics can be difficult to decipher when hundreds of tweets are posted by the second. Thankfully, there are a couple of Twitter tools that can help.

For those who have modest curiosity about trends, they are found on the right hand side of your Twitter home page. There you will see a hyperlinked list of the most popular keywords, or hashtags, being used right now. There is also a “global” trend link that will enable you to see what everyone is talking about around the world.

If you want to find out which blog posts are tweeted about the most you can try applications like Twittorati or Tweet Stats (a wordpress plugin). Twittorati tracks the top 100 bloggers and their tweets. Tweet Stats provides a feed for the “Most Tweeted Posts” and “Recently Tweeted Posts.” This is the easiest way to find out what is popular without leaving the Twittersphere.

-Those of you who are really interested in trends research can use a Twitter tool called Trendsmap to track regional trends worldwide. This application uses a numerous amount of tweets and algorithms to determine local trends for locations all over the world. Trendsmap is updated in real time.

What can you use Twitter trends for? If you know what everyone is talking about, you can choose keywords that can help you relate to the users that you are trying to reach. You can use this to develop a marketing strategy for your business or you can just do it for fun. Either way, the apps mentioned above can help you stay in the loop.

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