Top Twitter Tools & Resources Resource Center 

You can schedule your tweets in advance. You may want to announce a press release, for example, but would prefer to write the content ahead of time and have it go out tomorrow morning without needing to get up and put your finger on the send button.

This nifty little tool also enables you to send automated thank you notes to new followers.

Search Twitter by keyword to find out who's tweeting on any topic and what they are saying. For example, at the time of writing we searched for "SEO" and found pages of posts ranging from announcements of new SEO tools to Top 10 lists of SEO tips and more.

Advanced search options include the ability to limit your search to tweets from or to a particular person or within a certain geographic area.

The company also has a tool called Realtime Twitter Sentiment. Enter a keyword and it delivers a chart that summarizes the "sentiment" around that keyword based upon the good words, bad words and emoticons used in the tweets.

Day-parting comes to Twitter with this complimentary tool, which analyzes activity on your past Tweets (replies, retweets, clicks on links) and suggests times of day when you're more likely to get action.

Once you know these higher-traffic times, you can schedule Tweets, and Timely will send them out at its suggested intervals. A basic dashboard lets you customize your program and Tweet from multiple accounts. More customization is available if you upgrade to the Pro version.

Why optimize your Twitter feed for sending times? Because putting your Tweets out when people are more likely to see and act on them is likely to increase your following and generate better results, especially if you use Twitter for promotion.

You only have 140 characters to work with for your tweet. A cumbersome URL could take up way too much space. Cut and paste that URL into the TinyURL tool, and out will pop out an abbreviated URL like http://tinyurl/5k85ly. When clicked, it resolves to your URL and never expires.

The disadvantage is that your branded URL does not appear in your tweet. But do be aware that the TinyURL service (or many others like it ) are what's used in most tweets.

TweetBeep alerts you whenever any keyword you've registered with the service is being tweeted about. You can register your name, your product names, your URL, your brand name and so on. You can do the same using your competitors' keywords. You can zip right to any tweet to read it for yourself.

Twellow is the Yellow Pages of Twitter land. It analyzes Twitter messages and puts Twitterers in categories ranging from Accounting to Web Developers. Under the Advertising heading, we drilled down into the Marketing category. There were 175 Internet marketers listed, ranked by the number of twitterers who follow their tweets.

At the time of writing, top tweeters included Richard Sayer (5,480), Wayne Sutton (4,449), The New Media Expo (3,450) and Stephanie Agresta (2,767).

PS: The twitterer's user name is also listed, so you can use this search engine (or one of the many other Twitter search tools) to find all the tweets by that particular person.

PPS: Pardon the length of this review.

You may have a lot of followers on Twitter, but just how valuable are they? This application will check the number of followers of everyone on your contact list, the number of people they are following, and the ratio between them.

For example, examine 1,000 of your contacts and find those who have a following to followers ratio of 1:5. The more followers they have the more important they are. Thus you can cull your followers list quickly and efficiently.

Now that Twitter has swallowed Backtweets, which we used to track our mentions and retweets in a convenient daily email, we're looking for an alternative. Twilert comes pretty close.

Twilert is a relatively simple yet customizable tool that sends you a daily email report of your Twitter search results whenever you wish it. Choose your keyword, set your delivery time and pick your language. Twilert even tosses in a little basic sentiment analysis as well.

We'd like Twilert even more if it could track shortened URLs as well as the original version. Perhaps in the next upgrade?

TwitSprout slices and dices your public Twitter data into color-coded graphics that are easy on the eyes yet help you assess your Twitter performance in a single glance.

The one-page report, which you can view online, print as a PDF or download in .csv format, shows you whether your Twitter following is growing or shrinking. It also estimates your influence measurement according to your follows/followers ratio and how many Twitterers have added you to their lists, among other metrics.

TwitSprout is still in beta at time of writing so you'll have to wait for an official invite after you sign up.

Go right to the source to see all the ways Twitter has enhanced its service since it launched as a bare-bones status-updating service back in 2006.

Whether through acquisitions or in-house developments, Twitter's own user interface is more helpful now for both power users and newbies.

Here are four recent enhancements:

• Richer user interface, which reports trends, suggests people to follow, lists data on other Tweeters, saves searches and shows your mentions and retweets.
• Instant email notifications when someone mentions or favorites your Tweets.
• A side panel that opens to show detailed data about individual Tweets and Tweeters, including the conversation thread, the Tweeter's profile and other information.
• Twitter Lists, a productivity tool and measure of influence.