The Best Twitter Tools for Any Small Business
Posted on November 8, 2019 | Updated on August 5, 2022
Nearly every business imaginable includes social media in its marketing strategy. Twitter, with around 330 million monthly active users (MUAs), is one must-have social platform for any small business. You may have already set up your brand’s Twitter account and become intimately familiar with the platform. However, you want to do more than merely exist on Twitter. You want to get the most out of your business’s Twitter account. First, you’ll need to know which Twitter tools are the best for small businesses.
Luckily, developers have built a vast selection of Twitter tools to strengthen small business’ social media presences. If you want to grow your business and attract new audiences, use the following Twitter tools.
Jump to: Tweetdeck | Hootsuite | Buffer | Twitter Analytics | Canva | Periscope | Sprout | Crowdfire | TweetReach | Twitonomy | Social Mention | Biteable
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is a Twitter dashboard built for businesses.
It’s your Twitter homepage designed with brands in mind. Tweetdeck provides a series of customizable columns you can use to monitor feeds, post from multiple accounts and track trends and mentions.
However, the program doesn’t have any native analytics software or an analytics dashboard. It was developed by Twitter, which has its own analytics platform, Twitter Analytics. If you do use Tweetdeck, keep in mind you’ll also need to set up Analytics.
Price: Free
Hootsuite
This all-in-one social media platform manager integrates with most other Twitter tools.
Hootsuite is your social media command center, where you can manage Twitter and all your other social media accounts with the same platform. Its column-based display lets you keep track of trends, follows and mentions on the same screen. Powerful analytics tools give you the data you need to apply best advertising practices on Twitter to your social media strategy. Hootsuite is one of the oldest and most popular social media management systems, and for a good reason — it does what it needs to and does it well.
However, Hootsuite doesn’t do the especially fancy stuff — at least, not on its own. Hootsuite is robust, but other Twitter tools will beat it in their own niches. For live video streaming, you’ll need to turn to another app, like YouTube or Periscope. Hootsuite can also integrate with other Twitter tools, like Audiense.
Price: Free and paid plans are available. Free plans are limited to one user and three social platforms, and they may not offer the flexibility a small business needs. Paid plans offer more users, more social platforms and unlimited message scheduling. However, they cost more than most other social media management systems.
Their three available paid plans include:
- Hootsuite Pro: This plan for solo entrepreneurs costs $348 annually. This version supports up to 10 social media accounts but doesn’t offer Hootsuite’s full analytics software.
- Hootsuite Team Plan: This plan costs $1,548 annually. It supports three different users and offers Hootsuite’s full analytics.
- Hootsuite Business Plan: Hootsuite’s business-based plan costs $7,188 annually and supports up to five users.
Buffer
This cross-platform message scheduling solution allows you to schedule posts across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. That’s about all it does — no special tools track your posts’ engagement or plan for the best time of day to Tweet. Fortunately, it’s easy to integrate Buffer with Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, so the lack of analytics or monitoring tools won’t hurt much.
Price: Buffer offers a free plan with a limited number of users and several advanced paid plans. Plan prices run from $15 a month to $399 a month.
Twitter Analytics
If you’ve run an ad campaign on Twitter before, you’re probably already familiar with Twitter Analytics — Twitter’s in-house analytics solution.
Twitter Analytics offers all the features you’d expect from a robust analytics platform. You can check your followers’ locations and learn more about their interests and occupation. Analytics offers a wide array of metrics about Tweet engagements and engagement rate over time. It also provides audience insights like your followers’ ages, genders and education levels. Thus, you can optimize your business’ branding and better target your audience.
Twitter Analytics is also great for optimizing your Twitter ad campaigns — figure out what works, what doesn’t and when is the best time of day to post.
Price: Free
Canva
Want simple and elegant graphic designs for your brand? Turn to Canva.
Canva is an online, drag-and-drop image creation tool. It comes with numerous templates and stock images to choose from and makes creating graphics for your brand effortless. The program also includes typical graphic design software features like image cropping, transparency and resizing.
Most importantly, developers designed Canva with the average person in mind — so you don’t need to be a graphic designer to use it.
However, Canva doesn’t export graphics as vectors, at least for now. The resolution at which you export a Canva-created logo is as high-def as you’re going to get. Canva recommends exporting your graphics as large as possible, which should work well enough for now.
Price: Free, although you can upgrade to a paid plan that includes support for custom fonts, GIFs and more.
Periscope
In 2015, Twitter developed Periscope, its live video streaming service.
Periscope allows you to stream live video and embed your stream in a Tweet. It has its own analytics dashboard and activity tab that lets you track how viewers are interacting with your content.
However, Periscope doesn’t integrate all that much with Twitter beyond embedding support. You’ll need a Periscope account in addition to your Twitter login, and Periscope’s analytics features are mostly confined to its own platform. You won’t get much information about where your viewers come from, and you can’t necessarily link Periscope viewers back to Twitter accounts.
Price: Free
Sprout
Sprout is another social media management tool designed with small- to medium-sized businesses in mind.
The program has its own inbuilt analytics and Tweet and mention monitoring. It also supports multiple profiles and integrates with Feedly, suggesting shareable content based on the content creators you follow. The developers have even created a mobile version for both iPhone and Android, so you can manage all of your accounts while on the move.
Sprout’s user interface is unique among social media management tools. Unlike Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, Sprout doesn’t offer a social stream with multiple columns’ worth of feeds from different platforms. The view is single-column only, with one account per feed. If you find the multi-feed Hootsuite and Tweetdeck layouts too busy, Sprout is an ideal option for you.
Price: Free plans and paid plans are available. Paid plans are per month and per user, starting at $99 monthly and going up to $249 a month.
Crowdfire
Crowdfire gives you instant feedback on how well your tweets are performing with your intended audience.
You can schedule content ahead of time and manage more social media accounts than just Twitter, as well. In addition, you can automatically discover related content and share it with your social media followers to keep your timeline full even when you don’t have unique content to share.
Because of the internal analytics, you can easily schedule posts to go up at the premium time on your social platforms. The app has a Chrome extension, so you can instantly share articles when you find something of interest.
Price: Starts FREE with upgrades for more features and number of posts
TweetReach
Offered by Union Metrics, TweetReach Pro gives you in-depth social media analytics, real-time monitoring and a look at which hashtags perform best and what content your audience responds to.
The Social Manager Plan is $49 per month and gives you the ability to connect to three profiles and monitor a topic, as well as post up to 2,500 times per month. It also offers additional plans if you need more topics or posts.
When you choose a topic, TweetReach monitors all of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for information on that topic. This can help you get a leg up on your competitors.
Price: $49 per month for one user and 3 social profiles
Twitonomy
We love Twitonomy because it’s so easy to use on the go with your iPhone.
In addition to gaining information on Twitter analytics for your account, you can also get feedback on other tweets, such as an influencer you might consider hiring or a competitor’s page. You can easily monitor interactions with others, see who has mentioned and retweeted you, and find out who doesn’t follow you back.
The tool works on your desktop but is most useful on your phone, where you can instantly track tweets and make adjustments on the fly. Even better, the tool is free to download and try.
Price: Free
Social Mention
Want to figure out what your influencer score is and improve it? Social Mention offers insight into how well your followers interact with you and if your tweets perform or not.
Previously, people used Klout to figure out how well they were performing to their target audience, but the platform was bought out and shut down. However, Social Mention offers a viable alternative to Klout. Punch in a search term to find out how many times it’s mentioned across the internet, where and what the reputation score is.
For example, you might put in your brand name and see how often you are linked to and mentioned, as well as what the reach is. You can even see how often your name or brand comes up and how many unique authors mentioned you.
Price: Free
Biteable
Are you interested in adding a bit of video marketing to your promotional mix? Biteable allows you to create ones intended specifically for Twitter. You can create an engagement video, one for Twitter announcements, an ad or a #hashtag.
The WYSIWYG environment talks you through each step of the creation process, starting with choosing a type of video and a template. Start by uploading, working with the timeline, adding audio and previewing.
You can try the software for free and then buy a plan for as low as $20 per month. If you need to create additional videos, you can upgrade to a bigger plan at any time.
Price: $20 per month for the Starter Plan
Getting the Most out of Your Twitter Tools
No one Twitter tool is better than all the others. Although, a social media management platform is a great place to start.
While you might get pretty far by picking one or two of these Twitter tools, using them in conjunction with each other is the best strategy. Experiment and find what works for your business. The work you put in will pay off when you can use these Twitter tools to connect with your audience that much more.
This article was originally published on 9/3/2019 and updated on 11/8/2019.
About The Author
Eleanor Hecks is the Editor-in-Chief of Designerly Magazine, an online publication dedicated to providing in-depth content from the design and marketing industries. When she's not designing or writing code, you can find her exploring the outdoors with her husband and dog in their RV, burning calories at a local Zumba class, or curled up with a good book with her cats Gem and Cali.
You can find more of Eleanor's work at www.eleanorhecks.com.
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