Twitter is chaos, but in the midst of this beautiful mess is a ton of data that if you can understand, you can manipulate for your own use. To do that, you need the right set of tools. The good news is, there is an abundance of tools, both free and paid, out there that can help you do things like sort your followers, tell you when it is best to tweet (for higher exposure), find out who unfollowed you and more….
Here in this post, we’ve compiled a list of 80 free Twitter tools that can help you analyze all aspects of your Twitter account, discover new users and topics, track and manage your followers and Twitter lists, find and organize group chats and schedule tweets individually or in a group. Also included are WordPress plugins, Twitter clients, as well as other tools that help you do miscellaneous things on Twitter.
Discover Users, Content & Trending Topics
Swayy. It takes a look at your user’s behavior, data, content and signals to figure out personalized recommendations on what to post next.
Buzzsumo. Want to know the kind of content that works and where to find them? Find out about this as well as major industry influencers with this app.
Twipho. Search through Twitter via photos. Punch in a keyword to start your search, or follow the @twipho to see what photos are trending.
Topsy. The tool’s Social Search, Social Analytics and Social Trends give you an overall big picture of what is hot and what is not on Twitter.
Trends 24. A simple tool that shows you what topics were trending in an hour-by-hour breakdown for the past 24 hours.
Sonar Solo. Watch what the world is tweeting about in a circular interactive graph. Contains info on how many tweets and how fast these tweets are coming in.
Trendsmap. Trendsmap shows you the trending hashtags based on their interactive map. Just zoom in to get more detailed location-based tweets.
ITrended. Get reports on some of the biggest Twitter trends that took the world by storm. Heatmaps are included. First report is free.
Storify. The tool that lets everyone be a reporter, Storify is the tool to use when you are trying to cover breaking news or a live event.
Nuzzel. Find out what your friends have been sharing on Facebook and Twitter in the past 24 hours from the app or from a newsletter sent to your email.
Tag The Bird. Wonder what is trending in the Twitterverse? Find out what was trending today, this week, month, year or for all time.
Wefollow. Wefollow finds out what your interests are and calculates your prominence score based on who is “listening” to whom.
Brook Daily. Pick people you are following and this tool will send a daily digest of their 5 best tweets to you via email.
The Latest. Follow @latest_is to get links from interesting newsmakers on Twitter. Their list of top 10 most popular links gets updated in real-time.
Schedule Tweets
Hootsuite. A hongkiat.com favorite, Hootsuite lets you stay on top of all your tweets with an easy to use scheduling app and interface.
Buffer. Available as an extension, Buffer makes custom scheduling and scheduled retweets a breeze.
Tweet 4 me. Send DM to Tweet 4 me along with what time you expect the tweet to be released and that’s it – they will handle your tweets for you.
Manage Followers and Lists
Unfollowers. Analyzes your community and tells you if you are following the right people that will help you boost your influence.
Manageflitter. Sort followers by criteria, find who unfollowed you, find new users you can follow, manage multiple accounts and more.
Electoral HQ. Build, manage and explore Twitter lists for topics and people that interest you.
Entourage.io. Find your most influential followers, analyze the strengths of your competition and check out anyone’s entourage to see their influence.
Tweepi. Distinguish between those who did not follow you back versus spammers and inactive users (sources of clutter), sort users and get suggestions on who to follow.
Doesfollow. A simple tool that tells you if a Twitter user is following another Twitter user.
Crowdfire. Find out who recently unfollowed you or did not follow you back, the relationship between two Twitter accounts and sort your followers to whitelists and blacklists.
Twitterfav. Analyzes your content and tweets what matters to your followers for you. Touted as a Twitter growth tool, Twitterfav does your tweeting better than you.
Analytics
MyTopTweet. Find the top 10 most popular tweets for any Twitter account including yours.
Twtrland. Use this to expand your network on Twitter. It helps you discover the influencers in specific communities, their best content and the impact they can provide.
Social Bro. Find the followers that matter, the best times to tweet, the influencers that can help your cause and more.
Followerwonk. Sort followers, find influencers, analyze data, get interactive charts on followers and unfollows.
Tweriod. Find out the best period to tweet to your followers.
Twitonomy. Get detailed analytics and insights on tweets, RTs, replies, mentions, hashtags, keywords, followers and more.
SumAll. Get your data summarized and visualized for your analysis with SumAll. Aside from Twitter, SumAll also does data analysis for e-commerce, e-mail and traffic data.
Commun.it. Fancy a community manager for your Twitter community? Coca-cola and Microsoft are already using it to turn the tweeting battlefield into a relationship-building ,actually social platform.
Social Rank. Rank and sort your followers by their location, interest, specific criteria, or by how engaged and valuable (in terms of reach) they are to your brand.
Crowdriff. A Chrome plugin that gives you the info that matters, tweets, retweets, following and followers, top mentions, top hashtags for any username, in real time.
Bluenod. Build communities with the right influencers and track events as they happen.
Social bearing. It’s still in beta mode but it strives to provide quality tweets, hashtags, top influencers, users and more with their toosl. Also upcoming, geo-located tweets and maps.
Rowfeeder. If you run campaigns and contests often, Rowfeeder helps you track participation and displays the data in Excel. Also good for market research.
Tracking Hashtags and Mentions
Hashtagify. A search engine for hashtags, Tweetbe tells you the best hashtag to use to reach your followers.
RiteTag. Are you using the right hashtag? You will know which hashtags are good to use and which are overused with RiteTag. Available as a Chrome extension.
Twazzup. A search engine for Twitter, find popular posts, photos and links that matter to you, in real-time.
Mentionmapp. Find out who interacts with you more than others in this interactive map of wonder.
Tweet Binder. Sorts your hashtagged tweets for you while giving you detailed analytics on which categories win the popularity contest.
Seen. If you don’t know how a hashtag can tell a story, you should check out Seen. It collects the best photos, videos and people that will tell the story for you.
Twilert. Keep track of the Twitter hashtags, keywords or brands that matter to you via email alerts.
One Million Tweet Map. Stay on top of 1 million tweets happening right now. Every second, 50 of the oldest tweets are replaced with 50 latest. Follow the numbers on the interactive map to find what is trending.
#tagboard. Sorts what people are saying via hashtags and displays them on large TV displays for events and broadcasting purposes.
Private Tweets. Private Tweets introduces a bit of privacy into Twitter by allowing only the people you mention see your tweet.
Group Chatting
ChatSalad. Find a list of all the upcoming chats that are happening in the next few days, and get the times in your local time zone.
Twubs. Get a Twub page and send your audience there to start chatting. The feed is customizable, the host’s tweets stay up top and Twubs tells you the local time for the chats.
Twchat. Each hashtag gets a room and you can find Twitter chats that are currently happening or is happening soon.
Beatstrap. Live-blog as a team instead of going at it alone, with the help of Beatstrap. Works on desktop and mobile.
Nurph. Want to host a chat? This tool lets you run analytics if you do. Also allows participants to RSVP to an event.
Tweetchat. Stay on top of your Twitter chats with this tool. Updates in real-time. Pro version (coming soon) has a troll-bocking feature.
Group Tweeting
Group Tweet. Allow more than one user to tweet from the same account. Analytics show the participations of each user and measures their individual engagement.
Hootsuite. Get team mates in on the tweeting. With Hootsuite, tweets can be moderated before it gets out on its scheduled time.
Twitter Clients
Kiwi App.net. An alternative Twitter client for Mac, this one comes with continuity, keyboard shortcuts, unified or separated timelines (your choice) and more.
Carbon For Twitter. An Android Twitter client, Carbon keeps it elegant, simple and everything is on the same page
Tweetdeck. Track and engage your followers on multiple custom timelines on your feed. Allows multiple users to manage the same account. Available forWindows, Mac.
Yorufukurou (Night Owl). A Twitter client for Mac, it lets you manage multiple accounts, and create tabs for the result of each query you were looking for.
Twitterrific. An award-winning Twitter client for Mac and iOS devices.
UberSocial. Available for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, write your tweets in full with no worries about the 140-char limit. Links, images and media play inside the app.
Janetter. Available for both PC and Mac, Janetter supports multiple accounts, multiple timelines in the same view, multiple designs, URL shortening and more.
Plume. A Twitter client for Android, Plume comes with widgets, colored tweets, and the ability to tweet from your homescreen.
Tweeki. A Twitter client for Windows, it allows for cross-device syncing, so you can sync multiple Twitter accounts on any device.
WordPress Plugins
Twitter. The Official WP plugin for Twitter which allows embedded tweets, embedded Twitter video, Twitter cards, analytics, and ad conversion tracking.
WP to Twitter. When you update your WordPress blog, or share a link, this plugin updates Twitter for you complete with URL shortening. It also displays your recent tweets on a widget.
Kebo Twitter Feed. It takes only one minute to put in a twitter feed, with Kebo. All you need to know is how to click.
oAuth Twitter Feed For Developers. Does the heavy-lifting in a required authentication process so developers can just grab the list of tweets they need.
Other Twitter Tools
Bio Is Changed. Get notified if someone changes their bio or profile picture.
Like Explorer. Find out how popular a particular article or site is amongst 6 social sites including Twitter.
TweetieByte. Want your tweet history in the form of an infographic? Try this!
Clicktotweet. Write your message and generate a link with this tool. The link can be tracked over time. Plus when other users click ont he link it appears in their status box.
Twitter For Chrome. A Chrome plugin that lets you do all your Twitter deeds without leaving the browser.
Twitterfeed. Feed your content via RSS to social network sites like Twitter.
Tw Birthday. Find the day a user joined Twitter.
#FirstTweet. Find out what your first tweet was. Get ready to cringe.
Save Publishing. Searches for the best quotes in an article to include in your tweet. Available in a bookmarklet.
Tweekly. Get your tweets on a weekly basis based on what you want to see not on what Twitter thinks you should see.
Backtweets. Search through old Twitter archives for tweets that carry URLs linking back to your site.
Tweetymail. Basically, you use email to use Twitter. Tweet, reply to DM, follow users, get notifications, get alerts for Twitter lists, mentions and searches — all in your email.