My 3 Favorite Twitter Tools

I've been spending a lot of time analyzing Twitter these days. (Who isn't?) And there are some tools that I fall back on again and again. Partly for my own reference, and partly to share the love, here are my favorites. Got your own favorite? Please share!

1. Twitter User Bios
Firefox plugin. Install Greasemonkey and then install the plugin. Here's what it does: Next time you go to your Followers page in Twitter in Firefox, it will show you each and every person's bio, a link to their Web site, how many people they follow/are followed by, and their last tweet. (Much easier than going through each follower individually.) Good for culling your followers on occasion. (Ever ended up accidentally following a right-wing fundamentalist?)

2. Twitter Karma
I like this one even better for periodically reviewing my followers. You can screen your followers by looking at mutual follows (i.e., you both follow each other), people who follow you but you don't follow back (useful for catching up and adding friends every so often), and people who you follow but don't share the love. (Do you dump 'em?) Takes a while to load, but still good. Also, I like to look at the people I follow by last update date. Periodically, I'll unfollow anyone who hasn't Tweeted in the last month or two.

3. Twitter Counter
I like graphs. Twitter Counter shows you how your followers and friends and have grown over time. This is what tipped me off to the two recent spam clean-outs. I know not everyone is into BlogHer, but to lose that many followers in one day on July 24th? Something was up! Want to do a little competitive analysis on anyone? You can! You can pull up the data on any Twitter user. Twittercounter also recommends friends (some of which you are probably already following though).

Do you have a favorite Twitter tool? Let me know…