This post has been republished with permission of Buffer App.
By: Kevan Lee
This post originally published on August 11, 2014. We’ve updated it here with the latest, newest tools and screenshots.
For those familiar with the original post, we’ve added these new tools: Brook, Warble, Twitterific, Twurly, Filta, Hash, Klear, Twitter account home, Social Bearing, Stats for Twitter, Pablo, Spruce, Twitshot, Share As Image, Tagboard, Listen to Twitter, Squall, Thunderclap, Periscope, Meerkat, Twitter Feed, Twitterfav, Click to Tweet, Bedazzle, Pullquote.
Twitter is a fascinating adventure of relationships, entertainment, education, and fun. Now imagine layering on a few dozen power-ups.
That’s how it feels sometimes when you find just the right Twitter tool. And there’s a tool for practically every desire or whim.
Tools for productivity, for efficiency, for research, and so much more. With such a generous API, Twitter tools have become legion—and we social sharers are better off for it.
At Buffer, we tend to come across a fair share of social media tools. We’ve collected a great bunch to share with you! Here are all the tools we’ve found helpful and many more that we’re excited to try. If there’s a free Twitter tool out there, you’re likely to find a mention here in our list.
(If I missed any good free Twitter tools, let me know in the comments!)
The big list of 91 free Twitter tools for marketers
Navigate this list fast
Looking for something in particular? Try clicking one of these categories:
Analytics | Chats | Discovery | Follow/Unfollow | Hashtags | Images | Mentions & Monitoring | Scheduling | Timing | Trending Topics | Twitter Clients | Other
Twitter Tools for Analytics
1. Daily 140: Recent follows and favorites of 3 tweeps of your choosing
Find three folks on Twitter, and Daily 140 emails you once-a-day with all the new people they’ve followed and tweets they’ve favorited.
2. My Top Tweet: Your Top 10 list of tweets
Find anyone’s Top 10 tweets, ordered by engagement.
3. SocialBro: Analytics, optimization, and more
A nearly all-in-one platform for all things Twitter. The free plan comes with analytics, best time to tweet, follow/unfollow tools, and community segmentation.
4. Riffle: Data visualizations for any Twitter user
This browser plugin reveals vast insights into any Twitter user you choose. Discover statistics, popular hashtags, most shared links, connected profiles, and much more.
5. Twitonomy: Detailed analytics on users and tweets
A dashboard of analytics for whichever Twitter user you choose (even yours). Analyzes profiles, tweets, engagement, and more.
Track your influencer score (on a scale of 1-100) and use the Klout dashboard to create and schedule new tweets.
7. SumAll: Email reports for Twitter stats
Sync your Twitter to SumAll, and start seeing daily or weekly emails on how your followers are growing, your mentions, and your engagement.
8. SocialRank: Follower analysis to find your most awesome fans
Receive a sorted list of your best followers, most influential followers, and most engaged followers. Useful to track the important people to engage with on Twitter.
9. Klear: Social media analytics & a Twitter resume
Plug in your Twitter account to see a snapshot of who you follow, which demographics you fit, who’s in your close network, and more.
10. Bluenod: Community visualization
Type in a user or hashtag and see a detailed map or visualization about the community around the user or the people using the hashtag.
11. Twitter account home: The official overview of your Twitter profile
Head to analytics.twitter.com for a detailed overview of all your activity in the past 28 days, including your top tweets, top mentions, and top followers.
12. Social Bearing: Powerful search for tweets and profiles
Search Twitter keywords, locations, usernames, interests, or followers, then use your new-found knowledge to analyze your fellow tweeps or find new ones to follow.
13. Stats for Twitter: Beautiful iOS app to analyze yours and others’s Twitter accounts
See a visual breakdown of all sorts of Twitter stats: Followers analyzed by activity and popularity, competitors shown side-by-side with your account, etc.
Twitter Tools for Chats
14. Beatstrap: Team liveblogging
Cover live news, sports, and events through Twitter, via hashtags, and collaborate with your team on the coverage. Completed “Beats” come with an embed code.
15. TweetChat: Twitter chat management
Log in to follow a specific hashtag, hang out in a room that collects the hashtagged tweets for you, and reply as you like (with the hashtag added automatically to your tweet).
16. Chat Salad: A calendar of Twitter chats
See upcoming Twitter chats and when they’re scheduled, as well as the hashtags they use (so you can follow along).
17. Twubs: Twitter chat homepages
Register a hashtag for your chat and collect/view the tweets from one location.
18. Nurph: Chat planning and organizing
Nurph channels let you plan and organize your chat, complete with follow-up stats and replays.
19. TwChat: Real-time chat rooms for Twitter chats
Submit your hashtag. Enter your chat room. Have fun!
Twitter Tools for Discovering Fresh Content and Fun Users
20. Nuzzel: Discover what your friends are reading
As described by Twitter’s Joanna Geary, “find out what’s trending among the people the people you follow follow.” Make sense? Translation: Content discovery from friends and friend of friends.
21. BuzzSumo: Find influencers, topic-by-topic
Type in a keyword to see which voices get the most shares on Twitter. Find influencers, sniff out headline ideas, and learn what works on Twitter and who’s working it.
22. Swayy: What your followers are interested in
See the content that your followers recommend plus the topics they most enjoy. View it all via the dashboard or from a daily email digest.
23. Twipho: Searchable Twitter feed of photos
Search by keyword or by location to find photos shared on Twitter.
24. Topsy: A search engine for social
The most recent and most relevant tweets (and other social updates) based on a keyword search. Also shows keyword volume, sentiment score, and other analytics.
25. Digg Deeper: The best stories from your friends
An algorithmic display of the top articles and links that your Twitter followees have shared. Pair with News.me: a daily email newsletter of what your friends share on Twitter.
26. The Latest: A museum for the day’s best Twitter links
A real-time, constantly updated list of the most interesting links on Twitter, culled from the accounts of interesting people
27. Twurly: Daily email of top Twitter links
An easy way to stay on top of the best links in your timeline. Twurly analyzes the popularity and page authority of the links so you only see the best.
28. Filta: Bio search all your followers
Curious which of your followers are into football? Use Filta to search the bios of all your followers for any keyword you want.
29. Hash: Top stories on Twitter
A visual look at the leading stories and hashtags on Twitter. Available on the web and as an iOS app.
30. Brook: Customized Twitter digests of top tweets from top tweeps
Receive a daily email of the five best tweets from the Twitter users you choose.
Twitter Tools for Following & Unfollowing
31. Crowdfire: Powerful follower management
Prune your list of those you follow by seeing who follows you back, who’s recently unfollowed you, and who’s inactive, plus build a whitelist of accounts you’d always like to follow no matter what.
32. ManageFlitter: Follow/unfollow in bulk
Segment your followers according to a number of factors: last tweet, follower count, location, language and whether or not they follow you back.
33. Tweepi: Tidy up who you follow
Cleanup inactive follows, flush those who don’t follow back, and reciprocate someone else’s follow—all done in bulk and with a few clicks of a checkbox.
34. Unfollowers: In-depth follow/unfollow
Get a complete breakdown of those you follow, and unfollow with ease.
35. DoesFollow: See who follows whom
Does A follow B? Does Bill Gates follow Skrillex? Does Guy Kawasaki follow Jay Baer?
36. Commun.it: Complete follower management dashboard
See all the information on all your followers – top tweets, influence, and more.
37. T.U.N.S.: Twitter Unfollow Notification Service
Receive an email every time someone unfollows you.
38. Twindr: Tindr for unfollowing people (iOS)
Swipe left to unfollow, swipe right to keep following.
39. Toolset.co: Twitter toolset for finding people to follow or unfollow
Simple tools to grow your followers. Copy the follow list of another user, find users to follow based on keyword or device.
40. Linkreaser: Grow your following by finding accounts based on keyword
Share a keyword, and Linkreaser will find tweets and influencers you might like to see and follow.
41. FollowFly: What else are Twitter users sharing?
Search Twitter users, find their best content on Twitter and beyond – Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Reddit AMAs are currently supported.
Twitter Tools for Hashtags
42. Rite tag: Hashtag recommender
Plug in a hashtag and see feedback on the tag’s reach and popularity as well as suggestions for some alternatives to try. Complete with pretty colors to see at-a-glance which hashtags are best.
43. Hashtagify.me: Complete analytics into any hashtag
Enter a hashtag to discover related tags, recent conversations, usage patterns, and influencers.
44. Seen: Hashtag-based curation
Collect the media that was shared with a certain hashtag, then rank the results. Share your curation with friends and followers.
45. Tagboard: Mood boards for hashtags
Enter in a hashtag and Tagboard will pull all the most recent and relevant content into a highly useful board of tweets and visuals.
Twitter Tools for Images
46. Pablo: Create beautiful social media images in 30 seconds
A tool we build here at Buffer, Pablo lets you quickly share a quote or build an image with beautiful backgrounds from UnSplash and the best, catchiest fonts. Customize with your logo, too.
47. Spruce: Text over image
Create an attention-getting image with Spruce’s simple and quick image-making app.
48. Twitshot: See & share the images from any web page
Give Twitshot a URL, and it will pull in all the images associated with that page, giving you an easy option to see what to share.
49. Share As Image: Highlight text, create image
Highlight text from whatever page you’re on and click the Share As Image bookmarklet to toss that text directly into an eye-catching image.
Twitter Tools for Mentions & Monitoring
50. Warble: Alerts every time your blog posts are shared
Get an email whenever someone shares from your website—even if they don’t mention your username or if they use a link shortener. Warble also does full keyword, mention, and hashtag tracking.
51. Keyhole: LIke Google Alerts for Twitter
Ask Keyhole to notify you whenever a particular keyword, hashtag, or URL is mentioned. Helpful to track mentions of your own name or your company’s blog or campaign.
52. The One Million Tweetmap: Geolocated, real-time tweet monitoring
Track and follow keywords as they’re tweeted in real-time and at real places. Zoom in to a geotargeted area for super fine results.
53. Twilert: Real-time email alerts for keywords
Track keywords on Twitter and receive an email notification every time they’re mentioned. Great for keeping an eye on company names, new products, and branded hashtags.
54. Mention: Monitor your mentions
A listening tool for keeping up with all your mentions on Twitter. Tracks, analyzes, and displays any number of keywords via the Mention dashboard or via email digests.
55. MentionMapp: The web of you and those you mention
Get a visualization map of you and all the people you mention (and they people they mention).
56. Twazzup: Real-time keyword monitoring
Search and track any keyword, username, or hashtag. See a results page full of relevant tweets, user accounts, and influencers.
Twitter Tools for Scheduling Tweets
57. Buffer: Schedule your tweets (plus a whole lot more)
Simple social media management. Fill a queue of tweets, analyze their performance, and find new, hand-picked stories to share.
We also take a lot of inspiration from the great work of Hootsuite and Sprout Social, which offer an amazing list of management tools.
58. Tweet4me: Scheduled tweets via DM
Send a direct message to the Tweet4me account, use shorthand and prefixes to denote when to share, and let Tweet4me schedule and send the tweet for you.
Twitter Tools for Timing
59. Followerwonk: Search Twitter bios and analyze your followers
Every analysis imaginable for your Twitter feed, your profile, your followers, and your competitors.
60. Tweriod: Find the best times to tweet
Tweriod analyzes the tweets you send and your followers’s tweets to find the optimal time for engagement.
Twitter Tools for Trending Topics
61. Trends24: Detailed breakdowns of trending terms
See trending terms from the last—you guessed it—24 hours, broken out hour-by-hour and country-by-country. Enlightening for social media campaigns and geographic/timing research.
62. Trendsmap: Monitoring for local Twitter trends
A zoomable map that shows popular hashtags and terms from anywhere in the world with easy-click buttons to hone in on My City, My Region, and more.
63. iTrended: Did it trend?
Search the past 15 days to find whether certain keywords trended or not.
Top Twitter Clients
64. Tweetdeck: The king of Twitter clients
Via the app or the web, stay on top of your Twitter stream with Tweetdeck’s organization and tracking tools. Split your stream into segmented columns to stay engaged with what’s important.
65. YoruFukurou – Twitter client
A native Twitter client for Mac OS X. Dashboard views of incoming tweets, lists, and searches, split across multiple tabs. Comes highly recommended from Kottke.org.
66. Happy Friends: Mailbox-type reader
Pick the friends you want to hear from. Never miss their tweets. View all their activity via an inbox-style layout with nested updates.
67. Twitterific: Twitter client for iOS
Powerful Twitter client for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, with cool features like color-coded timelines and muffled keywords or hashtags.
Miscellaneous Twitter Tools
68. Like Explorer: See shares per article
Type in a URL. See the share numbers. Simple.
69. Twitter Feed – Serve your feed automatically to Twitter (and others)
Post a new article on your site. Send a tweet automatically.
70. TW Birthday: Dig up the date someone joined Twitter (even if they won’t say)
For those who omit the “date joined” on their profile, there’s still a way to discover it. See how long your new favorite follow has been tweeting or when a new profile officially landed.
71. Bio is Changed: be alerted when someone changes their Twitter bio (good for job moves)
Rather self-descriptive, this tool updates you when someone changes their Twitter bio. Useful if you’d like to track job moves and major news or even to learn from how people craft unique Twitter bios.
72. and 73. IFTTT & Zapier: Automate your tweeting
Connect multiple apps in unique ways to your Twitter account. For example, post your Instagram pictures as native Twitter photos.
74. Be Present: Track how fast you respond on Twitter
Real-time reports on your response time, response rate, and performance based on industry benchmarks. Also, really pretty to look at.
75. SavePublishing: Tweetable snippets on any website
Install the bookmarklet, and you can reveal any tweetable sentences (140 characters or fewer) from any article.
76. GroupTweet: Collaborate with teammates on one account
Let your teammates and coworkers share to the same account automatically with zero password-sharing. GroupTweet can even append usernames on to the end of individual tweets.
77. Storify: Beautiful Twitter storytelling
Grab any number of tweets and media elements, and place them all into a Storify collection that you can embed and share anywhere.
78. Tweet Topic Explorer: A word cloud per user
Discover the most-used words of any user you choose (even you).
79. Listen to Twitter: Listen to the sentiment of tweets
Type in a keyword and hear an audio track based on the sentiment of the tweets with that keyword.
80. Squall: Write more than 140 characters
Write however long you want, and Squall takes your text and turns it into an image to share with your tweet.
81. Thunderclap: Automated advocacy
Start a new campaign on Thunderclap, and if you get enough supporters to signup, Thunderclap will send your message out automatically through all your supporters’s Twitter accounts.
82. Periscope & Meerkat: Livestreaming
Live stream video of whatever you’re up to.
83. Twitterfav: Automatic favorites and RTs
Preselect tweets to be favorites or RT’ed based on rules you create.
84. Click to Tweet: Get people tweeting your content
Add a highlighted snippet of easily-tweetable text to your website or blog post.
85. Bedazzle: Rich text editor for Twitter, using unicode
Tons of options to make what looks like fancy fonts and styles in your tweet text (it’s really just unicode characters). Looks great on Macs, and perhaps not so much on Windows PCs.
86. Pullquote: Grab quotes of text from any web page and share easily
Available as Chrome extension, iOS app, and bookmarklet.
87. Who Tweeted It First: Find a story’s origin
Enter a keyword to see which person was the first to tweet it.
88. Little Pork Chop: Tweet storm
Write more than 140 characters, and Little Pork Chop chops your text into Twitter-sized snippets, posting them all one after the other.
89. Hubbble: Favorite reminder system
Favorite as many things as you’d like, and Hubbble will email you later to remind you to follow up on your faves.
90. Nudge: Reminders to engage on Twitter
Select tweets that you can boomerang back for followup later on.
91. SocialHunt: Track all activity for up to 5 tweeps
Receive an email every time someone shares to Twitter. Set the frequency from “now” to “daily.”
Additional resources:
- Twitter UK head of news Joanna Geary put together a Twitter collection of tools.
- Tim Carmody at Kottke.org shared a few of his favorite Twitter tools, too.
- A few great suggestions from some Twitter friends of mine.
- Our big list of 61 social media tools for small businesses.
- Our 29 free marketing tools.
What are your go-to Twitter tools?
Which tools are must-haves for you with your Twitter experience?
Which Twitter tools have you already used today?
My mornings always start with a read of News.me (the email version of Digg Deeper) and a dip into Buffer to check some stats. I spend most of my Twitter time replying to others directly from the native web app. In the evenings, I’ll grab some content suggestions from Buffer, Swayy, BuzzSumo, and a couple others and fill the Twitter queue for the next day.
I’d love to hear about your favorite Twitter tools in the comments!
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