11 Twitter tools you (probably) don’t know about

Editor’s Note: We are running this story again as part of our look back to the top social media stories of 2011 on Ragan.com. If these tools are no longer new to you, please suggest a new tool that may not be on your peers’ radar.

There are some great Twitter apps, sites and tips out there that you might not know about. Here are some of the best tools available to help you get the most out of your Twitter activity.

1. TweetEffect

TweetEffect is an excellent tool both for business and personal use. By searching for any Twitter username, you can see a summary of how many follows or unfollows that account gained over the past 30 days.

Where TweetEffect gets really clever though, is where it provides a full summary of your tweets, telling you which ones caused you to gain or lose followers, as well as how many followers you gained or lost. Tweets highlighted in green are the ones that brought you followers, and tweets in red are the tweets that lost followers.

Business users should monitor this to look for patterns. Some follows or unfollows may be coincidental, but you could find emerging patterns that allow you to optimize your Twitter activity.

2. Advanced search on TweetDeck