The past couple of times I’ve given presentations on social media, I have received questions from members of the audience about the best Twitter tools. Given the high-level of interest in this topic, I decided to do additional research, test out some of the most highly-recommended tools and publish my findings on the Communiqué PR blog.

Here are my favorite four tools:

Tweet Deck. This is my favorite tool because you can so easily filter information. I use it to follow keywords, handles and news. It makes it easy to customize your Twitter experience with columns, groups, saved searches and updates.

Social Oomph. I use Social Oomph to schedule tweets. This can be helpful if you have news to share at a particular time, but cannot be in front of your computer. I will admit I found the interface to be a bit confusing. It is not as easy or intuitive as Tweet Deck. However, once I got the hang of it I found it valuable for setting up a series of tweets, vetting followers and much more. I am using the free version of this tool, so I have not explored all of the functionality available in the paid version, but I really love the ability to schedule my tweets for an entire day. It allows me to share the information I want and frees up my time to respond and engage with people later in the day.

CoTweet – In conducting my research, I found many positive reviews of CoTweet. I knew I had to try it. The benefit of CoTweet is that it allows businesses to manage up to six accounts through one login, assign tweets to colleagues and share the responsibility of being the one on Twitter duty. With CoTweet, you can assign tweets to different customer service or marketing folks. For companies, such as Alaska Airlines and Starbucks, which are monitoring a lot of conversations and providing customer service via Twitter this tool is valuable. Colleen and I are still in the process of coming up to spend on this tool this for Communiqué. Once we have more direct experience with it, we’ll update the blog.

Bit.ly – Finally, I want to mention Bit.ly. This is a wonderful tool for shortening, sharing and tracking links. With this tool, one can track real-time traffic and get a sense of how many clicks your links are receiving (referrer data). Tracking is available after users shorten their long links with bit.ly by clicking on the “Info+” link on bit.ly, or just adding a “+” sign to the end of any bit.ly link (for example, http://bit.ly/n0og+).

What tools are you using to manage Twitter and other social networks? We would love to hear from you, if there is a particular solution that is helping you achieve your business and communications objectives.