Everyone loves Twitter. While other names, like Facebook and LinkedIn are equally used names, and equally famous, you’ll spot something. In every media event, advertising campaign and the like, the primary link for social media tie in is in fact Twitter. So, no doubt you want to make avail of intuitive Twitter marketing tools because clearly, Twitter is where it’s at. Why Twitter: Why is Twitter the most heavily used of the famous social networks? Well, to fully appreciate it, you have to look at some of the downsides of other networks. Facebook, for example, is a massively overdesigned tangle of mess, with so many statistics, redundant features and drama over all the superfluous statistics. It lacks focus and singular purpose. It tries to be a social sandbox. Well, it succeeds in that, but yeah, it’s a bit of a nuisance. You can say the same for many others, but not so much about Twitter. Twitter is patterned off of old SMS systems at its heart, and in fact is intrinsically designed to be very supportive of this aging comm channel even now. It has a limited character count per message, and a simple but very dynamic logic to who hears what. Following is a simple subscription, just like YouTube. Every message you tweet is heard by everyone following you, and anyone whose username is in the message (proceeded by the “at” symbol, or @) also hears it. That’s really all there is to it. So the only statistics are mentions, tweets sent, tweets heard, and count of followers or users one follows. Along with one other thing, the trend topic, which associates all tweets by users containing the trending word, proceeded by a hash tag (#) into a group, that’s really all there is to it. It also allows embedded links in tweets, to share video, images and URL links, along with a solid PM system for off the record conversations with others. The Problem with Twitter Marketing Tools: Twitter isn’t too complicated to write tools for. The problem is it’s so simple despite being powerful, that there’s really not much that needs to be done. What little that does, has been done pretty much. What We’re Left With: #1 – Twitter’s Internal Mechanics Twitter has some built in tools for business and marketing use, such as tweet handling, mention tracking, trend springing, and sponsorships for better outreach. These aren’t there when you first start a Twitter account, leaving many (including myself for a long time) thinking we needed outside tools for some of this when we didn’t. #2 – Netsuite BI: Netsuite, along with other popular SaaS suites, offers a BI (business intelligence) service. This type of service is designed to handle automated capture and analysis of social network analytics and statistics. Twitter is a big one for this kind of software, allowing the capture and response to mentions, context and trending. It augments Twitter’s native stuff by allowing direct import to your CRM and databases without forcing an employee to manually transpose it. #3 – Twitter Mobile Twitter mobile may not sound like something all that important here, but in all honesty, you really need this. If you’re going to be using Twitter as a live marketing and customer interaction platform, you need to hear and respond to it no matter where you are, with a quick few taps of a form. Conclusion: These Twitter marketing tools may sound lackluster, but they’re all you really need. Twitter is so pure and simple that there’s not much need to overly complicate tools for it. This is a good thing actually.