5 Twitter Apps Every Marketer Should Test-Drive In 2010

If you're a person working in the marketing and communications industry you never (ever!) get tired of stumbling across tools that can make your life more productive and easier.

As Twitter continues to mature, so to have the apps / tools being developed for people working in these industries.

Importantly, the appropriate use of these tools should ensure clients / brands extract more value from social media platforms.

I've identified five tools that have the potential to 'go big' in 2010, especially for marketing and comms folk...both from a personal productivity standpoint and in the delivery of campaigns.

We've even secured an exclusive interview with the CEO of one of these apps...enjoy...

5 Twitter Apps Every Marketer Should Test-Drive In 2010

BuzzBox - A Personal News Filtering Service aka A PRs Best Friend

(Exclusive Interview with BuzzBox CEO, Anu Nigam)

This is still in Beta and in its very early stages, but judging by the effort made by the CEO of BuzzBox, Anu Nigam, in explaining this service to me overnight I have no doubt it will be a success.

I'll let Anu do the talking:

"BuzzBox is going be your personal filtering engine for news, though right now we only do technology news. At the end of the month, we are going to be adding other filters outside of technology news and we are also going to improve the UI (User Interface). So you can look forward to some great changes.

"The current product helps users get through the noise of the news by creating a personal list of top stories of the day based on sources you select.

"So the top stories are different for everyone. The list is constantly changing as the news changes and stories get older they fall down."

You can watch that video that explains it in further via the website.

I've just started using it and like what I see so far.

Tweet You There - The Conference Connector

I wanted to put this high up in the list as it made its 'official' debut at CES this week...hopefully attendees can provide us with some first hand feedback.

Firstly, you better get used to this term: Twelegates - yep, another annoying Twitterism (which the developers of this app openly own up to) but thanks to Tweet You There it might just take off.

What is it?

Tweet You There is described as a 'data visualisation tool for the buzz happening at conferences' which is only part of the story.

In time it could be 'the tool' for conference attendees, helping people to connect in real life...with more ease than they would have previously as the open database will let you know if one of your 'contacts' is at the same event.

ObectiveMarketer - The Campaign Manager

Mr AllTop himself, Guy Kawasaki, gives this a nice introduction:

"There is no better way to create, test, and modify Twitter-based marketing than ObjectiveMarketer. If you’re going to take heat for using Twitter as tool, you might as well do it well."

What is it?

The closest thing to a complete central management system / tool for social marketing going around.

Suitable for both organisations and agencies, this enables the user to execute campaigns via the one platform, combined with analytics and insights to adjust / improve tactics as the campaign develops.

The developers make a point of this being a customer-centric tool - find out for yourself by signing up for a trial at http://objectivemarketer.com/

NutshellMail - The Twitter Personal Assistant aka 'Lloyd'

I love this! If you're an Entourage fan, I liken this to a Twitter version of Lloyd: a reliable social networking PA.

In their words Nutshell is "for the busy social networker who doesn't have time to hang out online all day."

What is it?

In short, this solution will send you a daily email providing you with a snapshot of your Twitter activity, including new followers, quitters, DMs, @replies and even custom search phrases.

So, if you've had a massive day of meetings, or a pivotal day in a campaign, this can give you an update all at once and you won't have missed a step.

It also incorporates other platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.

CrowdCampaign - Twitter-Powered Contest Tool

I haven't used this yet, but I'd like to try it out.

What is it?

CrowdCampaign is a social tool for building brands via contests / competitions

It's used by ad agencies, event managers, social media marketers – anyone who wants to leverage the power of the social web to build a brand via interaction / engagement.

(Apparently) it is 'easy to customize and manage, you can launch a Twitter-powered contest including a branded promotional site in minutes from your desktop'.

Like I said, I haven't tried this one, but it appears as though it could be a neat solution.

A couple of others worth checking out include:

TuneIn - "Brings you the media that's important to you right now."

SocialWare - A 'social middleware platform' that helps distinguish between professional and personal content across all platforms.

As with any tool / app that is relatively new on the scene, it will take a while to assess usefulness and impact.

But they are worthy of a look...and perhaps may become 'big players' in 2010.

Have you tried any of these out? Let us know how useful you found them.

AV