Have you been hearing a lot about Twitter of late? I know I’ve been discussing it a constantly.  Twitter is the internet marketing industry’s newborn golden child. It can be a convincing lead source and if you can muster a sufficient number of retweets for your links joining the Twitter village can effectively impact your website’s search engine presence! Marketing in this fashion can help any business. Anyone who needs new clients will find a lot of them on Twitter, but service pros like Accountants will find joining the “Twitosphere” particularly beneficial.  You’ll find a lot of prospects, clients, and colleagues using Twitter. If you’re not familiar with this new social marketing tool you’re falling behind. Take some time to learn about it. There is a good article about it here.

Twitter is not without it’s downside. The number of tweets you’ll be seeing will quickly become overwhelming. If you’re already marketing to all the “tweeple” out there you are no doubt dealing with these challenges. There’s a lot of noise on Twitter and picking through it for tweets and finding references worth engaging can be a surprising amount of work.

Let me offer you a little bit of free advice. Don’t be the guy making noise. Keep your posts relevant. When you make a post it will appear on your friends pages, and they really don’t want you cluttering up their page with a half dozen useless posts a day. If you leave lots of gratuitous messages people will stop following you.

This deluge of data can be managed. There are a number of applications that have been developed to help you navigate this new environment.

There are two ways to access Twitter. Most people just log in through the Twitter website. Obviously you should assume this is how most of your followers are viewing your posts. Consider this the main method of accessing the service. It’s certainly not the only way, though. There are also a variety of third party programs for use with your desktop, notebook, or mobile device. Not only do these present a more stylish interface, they often have tools that make your journey more orderly. We’ll explore a few of these.

TweetDeck
One is TweetDeck, originally from the creators of Seesmic Desktop (an earlier incarnation of the same application). With this program, you can log in to and manage multiple accounts, organized in columns, of which the default includes all friends, mentions, and direct messages.

More recently, TweetDeck has grown to support FourSquare and Facebook, as well as providing Twitter’s trending topics. You can even access hash tag searches quickly and easily. Best of all, the program is free.

Tweetie and Twitterific

For more simplistic interfaces, programs like Tweetie and Twitterific are good bets. Both can be run without a license, but it’s not really freeware. If you don’t pay you will have to deal with pop-up ads. Both programs allow you to access mentions and direct messages.

TwitWipe

One challenge with Twitter is the how cumbersome it is to delete tweets. Under normal circumstances, the only way to do this is by logging in and deleting the tweets by hand. It’s easy enough to delete a few tweets at a time, but sooner or later you’re going to want to delete all your previous tweets. When that time comes you could have thousands of tweets piled up. Deleting that many tweets just isn’t practical.

Fortunately, there’s a freeware application that will make this easier and more cost effective for you. It’s a web based utility rather than an installed application. Using this tool you can quickly and easily delete as many tweets as you may need to delete in a single operation. You can get it free at it’s website: twitwipe.com.

A Couple Quick Warnings: First, Twitwipe doesn’t allow you selectively delete tweets. It’s going to erase EVERYTHING. As far as I know, there isn’t any way to pick and choose between your tweets. Also, be warned. The website looks like t was built by an angry teenager rather than a professional coder. The guy is crude and has absolutely no talent for marketing. The very first thing you’re going to see is the F-Bomb in great, big, boldface letters when you visit the site. He cusses like a sailor all over the site. The product itself, however, works exactly as advertised.

Get Organized and then Get Started

These apps make it easier to dive into Twitter without getting overwhelmed. Twitter is a vast approachable community. Last time I checked it was boasting more than 75 million users around the world.

Can you truthfully afford not to take advantage of it?

About the Author
Brian O’Connell is the CEO and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country’s leading businesses oriented exclusively to CPASites. His company presently provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, and tax preparation firms.