Free, Affordable, and Easy-to-User Twitter Scheduling Tools

Did you know there are a number of free and affordable Twitter tools and Twitter apps that make it easy for you to schedule specific times for your Twitter updates to publish on your Twitter timeline? Scheduling Twitter updates is a great way to keep your Twitter stream active, connect with more people, and streamline activities so you can save time and be more productive. Following are several popular Twitter scheduling tools that you can use to keep your own Twitter timeline active even when you're not online.

1. TweetDeck

TweetDeck started out as a third-party Twitter app but is now owned by Twitter. It allows you to manage your Twitter activities, including scheduling tweets to publish in the future. TweetDeck offers desktop, online, and mobile versions, so you can easily use it from any device and at anytime.

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2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another Twitter management tool that also allows you to manage your Facebook and LinkedIn activities from a single dashboard. There are free and paid versions of Hootsuite with different features, but even the free version of Hootsuite enables you to schedule tweets.

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3. SocialOomph

SocialOomph provides a wide variety of features, including the ability to schedule tweets to publish in the future. This feature is available in the free version of SocialOomph. Paid versions of SocialOomph are on the high-end in terms of price for small bloggers, but if you just need a Twitter scheduling tool, it's worth checking out the free version.

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4. Timely

Timely is a bit unique in that it auto-schedules when your tweets will be published based on your recent Twitter activity, including your last 199 tweets. Using that information along with information related to how you engage with your Twitter followers, Timely determines the best time to publish your tweets. It's free to sign-up for Timely.

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5. CoTweet

CoTweet is very popular because it enables groups of people to manage Twitter accounts. This is particularly helpful to businesses or team blogs with multiple people who publish tweets on the company or blog's Twitter profile. With a free account, you can manage multiple Twitter accounts, including scheduling tweets. Paid versions offer even more options.

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6. Twaitter

Twaitter is a cool tool that boasts features for individuals and businesses, including scheduling tweets. It's free to use and with a useful Twitter calendar, statistics, groups, and the ability to publish updates to multiple Twitter accounts and multiple social network accounts such as Facebook and LinkedIn, Twaitter offers a lot more than the name implies. Twaitter is definitely worth checking out.

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7. MediaFunnel

MediaFunnel enables up to two people to manage up to two Twitter profiles through a single, free account. If you want to add additional users to co-manage your Twitter profile, you pay $1 per month per user. If you want to add additional Twitter profiles or social media accounts (such as Facebook profiles and pages), you can do so for $1 per account per month. Paid accounts also get access to statistics.

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8. Sprout Social

There are many paid social media management and monitoring tools, but Sprout Social is targeted to small business owners. That means it's one of the most affordable (as low as $9 per month) and it does provide the ability to schedule tweets and much more. If you're ready to take your Twitter efforts to the next level, then considering a paid tool like Social Sprout is a sensible next step.

Read Also: Feed Your Blog to Twitter with Twitterfeed


Free, Affordable, and Easy-to-User Twitter Scheduling Tools

Feed Your Blog to Twitter with Twitterfeed

An easy way to share your blog posts on your Twitter profile, Facebook profile, and more is to use the Twitterfeed Twitter app. Not only is it easy to use, but it can help you save time and drive traffic to your blog by automatically publishing an update to your Twitter profile each time you publish a new blog post with a link to that post.

The Positives of Twitterfeed

Twitterfeed is free to use and very easy to set up. Just create an account and paste your blog's feed URL into the text box provided to set up a new feed. You can also configure advanced settings such as a snippet of text to appear before the automated tweet (such as "New blog post"), frequency of updates, what tool you want to use to shorten URLs, if you want to tweet the title of your posts and snippets or just titles, text to appear at the end of tweets, and more. You can also view simple statistics to learn what links are generating clicks on your Twitter profile.

The Negatives of Twitterfeed

There really aren't any negatives to Twitterfeed. It does what it claims, and it does it well. If you want more advanced features, then Twitterfeed might not offer everything you need, but to simply automate the process of updating your Twitter stream with links to your blog posts, Twitterfeed is a great option.

The Bottom-line about Twitterfeed

You can't go wrong with Twitterfeed. The price and ease of use make it worth trying!

Read Also: Organize Your Twitter Tweets and Followers with TweetDeck

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Feed Your Blog to Twitter with Twitterfeed 

Organize Your Twitter Tweets and Followers with TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a useful Twitter app that allows you to group your followers, making it easier to keep track of conversations and keep your Twitter discussions and sharing organized. It is free to download and works for both PC and Mac users.

The Positives of TweetDeck

TweetDeck allows you to create separate panes on your screen, so you can easily manage your tweets, @replies, direct messages and more. You can customize the panes to make them work for you. You can also group followers into categories of your choice (for example, you can separate your family members from your coworkers, and so on), and you can perform Twitter searches directly through TweetDeck. Of course, you can publish tweets directly from TweetDeck, too.

The Negatives of TweetDeck

TweetDeck uses a lot of memory on your computer. While it makes tweet management easier, it can slow things down. Many TweetDeck users choose to keep it open on a separate computer while doing other work on their primary computer. Also, you have to download Adobe AIR (which is free) to use TweetDeck. It's a safe program offered through Adobe and can be downloaded as part of your TweetDeck download, but it's worth mentioning that an additional software is required to use TweetDeck. Finally, you can only have three panes open at any given time on your TweetDeck screen, which can feel limiting for true power Twitter users or people who like to be highly organized. Of course, three panes are better than one.

The Bottom-line About TweetDeck

TweetDeck is most useful for Twitter users who have large followings (at least a few hundred) and need a tool to better manage tweets, so important ones aren't missed. Also, the grouping feature is extremely helpful to Twitter users who communicate with separate audiences through their Twitter account. Since TweetDeck is free to download and test, it's worth trying. Some people find it a lifesaver while others don't find much value in it at all. It really depends on how you like to organize and manage your Twitter activities, and you won't know if TweetDeck will meet your needs until you give it a test drive. Remember, you can always stop using it if it doesn't meet your needs and doing so won't affect your direct Twitter account at all.

Read Also: Twitter Tools for Bloggers

Organize Your Twitter Tweets and Followers with TweetDeck

Twitter Tools for Bloggers

Twitter is an excellent place to spread the word about your blog posts and increase traffic to your blog, but are you using all of the Twitter tools that can make it even easier to boost traffic and build a successful blog? There is more to Twitter than publishing tweets and following people, and the tools described below can help you take your blog to the next level of growth, influence, and success.

1. WeFollow

WeFollow is a great tool to find people to follow on Twitter. It's a directory of Twitter profiles by category, which includes follower counts, too. Use it to search keyword tags and find people who tweet about your blog's topic as well as online influencers who have the eyes and ears of your target audience.

2. Monitter

Monitter is best described as a real-time Twitter search tool that you can use to monitor keywords of your choice on Twitter. As people include your keywords in their tweets, you'll see those tweets in your continually updated feeds, which are displayed as individual columns on the Monitter website. You can narrow your results by geographic location and follow trending tweets, too. When you see a tweet related to your blog, join the conversation!

3. TweetMeme

TweetMeme offers the extremely popular Retweet button, which you can add to your blog so people can tweet your blog posts to their followers with a single mouse click. You can also visit the TweetMeme website to find the most tweeted links, news, images, and videos in the past 24 hours or past 7 days. To narrow your results, choose from any of the categories in the top navigation bar, which include business, entertainment, comedy, and more.

4. Twellow

Twellow is often referred to as the Yellow Pages of Twitter. Any Twitter user can add his or her profile to the Twellow directory. You can add yours, too. Using the categories provided, you can also use Twellow to search for people to follow on Twitter who might be interested in your blog content. If you want to connect with people in your local area who use Twitter or in certain parts of the world, navigate to the Twellowhood section of the site to find Twitter users by geographic area.

5. Listorious

Listorious takes the list feature in Twitter to a new level of usefulness. Search by keyword, region, topic, or profession, and when you find people who might be interested in your blog, you can follow them on Twitter. Popular lists, top tags, and related terms make search results even more detailed and useful. Spend a few minutes on Listorious, and you'll be glad you did.

6. NearbyTweets

Want to find Twitter users in your area or another specific geographic location? Just use the map tool on the NearbyTweets website, and you can do it in seconds. You can narrow results even further by entering a location and a keyword. For example, if you want to find people in Atlanta, Georgia who are tweeting about marketing, you can enter the city and keyword and get targeted results.

7. TweetDeck

Create a TweetDeck account, and managing your Twitter account will be easier within minutes. You can set up all of your feeds to follow, such as keywords and mentions, schedule tweets, group followers into categories, and more. In other words, TweetDeck saves you time by keeping you organized and helps you get the best results from your Twitter efforts.

8. Twitterfeed

Automatically publish tweets with links to your new blog posts with Twitterfeed. It only takes a few minutes to set up, but it saves you a lot of time in the future. You can also use Twitterfeed to feed your blog posts to your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. While it's true that you shouldn't fill your Twitter feed with automated posts, streamlining the process to tweet links to your new blog posts using a tool like Twitterfeed is perfectly acceptable. Just be sure to tweet even more tweets that are not automated than tweets that are automated.

Read Also: Free, Affordable, and Easy-to-User Twitter Scheduling Tools



Twitter Tools for Bloggers 

Getting Started with Twitter Bootstrap

Building a website from the ground up is very hard. Even some people who are able to code in web languages like JavaScript, HTML and CSS would find difficulties in the process. Fortunately, a few Twitter developers and designers are aware of this situation and had launched a framework called Bootstrap to make life easier for web designers and developers.

And, in this post, we are going to look into Bootstrap and try out a few of the features provided, to see how this framework can speed up our web development process.

Utilizing Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a very powerful framework for front-end development, and is equipped with a bunch of features we need to develop a fully functional website faster and easier without having to build it from scratch. Some of the features included in Bootstrap are:

• CSS grid for creating responsive layout
• CSS base for typography, buttons, forms, tables and images
• User interface components such as navigation, progress bars, alerts, pagination, breadcrumbs, etc. with consistent and modern styles
• jQuery plugins to build an interactive experience on the website

Now, we assume that you have downloaded Bootstrap and have all the assets on set including the JavaScript and the CSS as follows;

<link rel="stylesheet" href="css/bootstrap.css">
<script src="js/bootstrap.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

We can start trying out some of these features.

CSS Base: Button

Bootstrap has Base CSS that consists of styles for some fundamental HTML elements including the <button> element. Button is a common element found in a website and in Bootstrap the button style is applied with btn class;

<button type="button" class="btn">Default Button</button>

This markup results in the following presentation which is the default style for a button;

We can also apply additional classes to define the button’s role;

<button type="button" class="btn btn-success">Button</button>
<button type="button" class="btn btn-warning">Button</button>
<button type="button" class="btn btn-danger">Button</button>

Depending on the role, each button will be given a different color:

Recommended Reading: CSS Back To Basics: Terminology Explained

The Bootstrap style is built with LESS. We have actually covered LESS a couple of times before, and if you have familiar with this CSS preprocessor, we suggest you use it instead of using regular CSS; that way the styles will be much more configurable.
For example, let’s say the color of the “success button” above doesn’t fit quite well with our design; we can simply change the variables provided in variables.less file, like so;

@btnSuccessBackground:              #bce895; //#62c462;
@btnSuccessBackgroundHighlight:     #a0cd78; //#51a351;

Since the other arguments such as the shadows and gradients have been pre-configured, the styles will be automatically adjusted and will result in the following presentation;

User Interface Components

Bootstrap also provides some reusable UI components for navigation, pagination, progress bars, buttons and many more. Adding these components are also as easy as styling the buttons in previous sections and, in this example, we will enhance those buttons and put them into a group of buttons, like so;

<div class="btn-group">
<button type="button" class="btn btn-success">Button</button>
<button type="button" class="btn btn-warning">Button</button>
<button type="button" class="btn btn-danger">Button</button>
</div>

Notice our buttons are now wrapped inside a <div> with btn-group class, this will result in the following presentation;

We can also add this an extra class, btn-group-vertical to flow the button vertically;

<div class="btn-group btn-group-vertical">
<button type="button" class="btn btn-success">Button</button>
<button type="button" class="btn btn-warning">Button</button>
<button type="button" class="btn btn-danger">Button</button>
</div>

jQuery Plugins

I still remember when I first created a static website and have to jump around from one website to another to find a suitable plugin to apply an interactive feature on the website. You need not experience the same roundaround with Bootstrap as it comes with several jQuery plugins like Accordion, Modal, Tooltip, Popup, Tab and many more.
In the following example, we are going to apply Tooltip Plugin from Bootstrap.

<p id="container">Jujubes icing oat cake 
<a href="#" rel="tooltip" title="a Lolipop Tiramissu?">lollipop tiramisu</a>. 
Tiramisu sesame snaps croissant chupa chups chupa chups chocolate cake candy sugar plum 
jelly beans. Lollipop pudding jelly sweet jujubes cookie pudding. Oat cake topping gummi 
bears oat cake. Muffin jelly-o cake sesame snaps ice cream cotton candy.</p>	

Notice that we have added a link with rel and title attribute on it. This is the link that will show a tooltip when we hover over it. To activate the tooltip we can simply add the following script;

$('#container').tooltip({
    selector: "a[rel=tooltip]"
});

This script will target every link under #container with rel=tooltip;

As we can see, adding Tooltip with Bootstrap plugins are fairly straightforward and unlike the olden days (where sometimes we can run into conflict and errors when applying several different plugins), these plugins – Tooltip, Popup, Tabs, etc – can work flawlessly all together.

Customization

Bootstrap is a huge framework; in certain circumstances this could be just too much. For that reason, Bootstrap also provides a dedicated page for customization. There are a few things we can customize in this page starting from the color variables to the plugins that we need.

Conclusion

There are actually many other features in Bootstrap, way more than what we can accommodate in this post. But in the next post we will walk you through to these features and build a real thing with Bootstrap. Below we have put together ten very well-designed websites that used Bootstrap as their foundation, to inspire you.

The Studio Dreams

Madeira Cloud

Open Cooks

Leanix

BreweryDB

Kippt

8020 Select

Appster

WS Interactive

Percentage Calculator

Tips from hongkiat.com
Getting Started with Twitter Bootstrap

Twitter to Debut Own Photo Filters in Response to Instagram Move

Twitter is rumored to be slapping back at Instagram by launching its own set of photo filters.
The feature, which, according to news reports, will be available before year’s end, is in response to Instagram’s decision to disable Twitter users’ ability to properly display its photos.
The filters will be made for use inside the official Twitter app, according to AllThingsD.
The new version of the app is in the testing phase, according to the AllThingsD report. In fact, that could be the reason Twitter chairman Jack Dorsey has posted so many black and white photos over the weekend.

The deteriorating relationship between Twitter and Instagram may be at least partly responsible for the Facebook-owned mobile photo-sharing service’s recent decision to distance itself from Twitter.
Instagram and Twitter, once allies in the battle against Facebook, are now on opposite sides of the fence.

Twitter posted a brief statement Dec. 5 to acknowledge it is aware of the issue:
“Users are experiencing issues with viewing Instagram photos on Twitter,” the website reads.
“Issues include cropped images. This is due to Instagram disabling its Twitter cards integration, and as a result, photos are being displayed using a pre-cards experience. So, when users click on Tweets with an Instagram link, photos appear cropped.”

Instagram’s founder and CEO Kevin Systrom said during the LeWeb 12 conference Dec. 5 that the move is related to Instagram’s desire to take control of its content, the New York Times reported.
“We’ve decided that right now, what makes sense, is to direct our users to the Instagram website,” Systrom said.

According to the Tech Crunch, Systrom said it is just a matter of time before Instagram images will no longer be visible on Twitter. Instead all clicks will go directly to Instagram.com.
“We’re working on building an awesome web presence, which we just launched,” said Systrom. “We revamped our web properties, and now we’re able to staff up teams to work on web properties with the Facebook acquisition.”


Post from: SiteProNews

Twitter Wins the U.S. Election by a Landslide

Despite the final vote tally, Twitter was the clear winner of the 2012 U.S. Presidential election.
No matter what your political bias, the Twitter feed for the past 24 hours has captured the highest and lowest points, the heckling, the gags, the tantrums and the vote count.
Once again, Twitter was the place to be to get the most up-to-date vote tally as states fell to each of the candidates.
With news agencies reporting inconsistent or biased results, confused voters turned to Twitter to get faster updates via the hashtags #Election2012, #USElection and #USAElection.
According to Twitter staff, election conversation saw Twitter reach a peak of 327,452 tweets per minute, with not a single Fail Whale in sight – something Twitter staff was extremely proud of.
The company has clearly improved on its server load contingency plan since the last election.
And just as well too, because newly re-elected President Barack Obama (@BarackObama) chose Twitter as the medium for his first acknowledgements of victory:

More than half a million people retweeted President Obama’s victorious “Four More Years” photo tweet:

However, not everyone was happy with the election outcome. Outspoken Republican Donald Trump (@realdonaldtrump) surprised everyone with his vitriolic, bizarre and seemingly unpatriotic stream of tweets immediately following Obama’s victory:

Possibly the most amusing point about this epic tantrum was Trump’s incorrect assumption that Romney had won the popular vote and that the world was laughing at America because of a miscarriage of democracy caused by the electoral college system.
The tweets highlighted with the green pepper were actually deleted from Trump’s feed within an hour of them being posted, suggesting that Trump’s minders may have stepped in to prevent him from further embarrassment.
Trump’s tantrum prompted a wave of hilarious responses from the Twitterverse, some of which are highlighted below:

But for those of us who stayed on Twitter during President Obama’s victory speech, the hilarity continued. About halfway during his speech, someone on Twitter pointed out that the woman in the crowd directly over the president’s left shoulder had decided to stick her U.S. flag into her hair and was waving it about with great enthusiasm:

The gesture generated an instant Twitter meme, similar to the one NASA employee @tweetsoutloud prompted when his space-influenced mohawk was spotted on camera during the recent Mars Rover landing.
Within a minute or two, the hashtag #hairflag was born, with witty tweets temporarily hijacking responses to the president’s moving and heartfelt speech:

I couldn’t resist a #hairflag tweet of my own! By the time President Obama walked offstage, the #hairflag meme was in full swing, with inspirational posters, Facebook pages and parody Twitter accounts.
So Election Day closes with 31 million tweets posted and Twitter a clear winner, once again.
Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
Post from: SiteProNews

Giude to Customize Twitter Backgrounds

There are a great deal of Twitter users adopting a policy of consistent branding and positioning carried across from other Webspaces, e.g. Websites, eStorefronts, etc., by employing customized Twitter backgrounds. This would seem to be defined as best practice, as many marketers advise keeping the process of branding both homogenous and persistent transversely through availed channels.

Customized backgrounds lend an air of professionalism to one’s Twitter account. Also, followers tend to be encouraged when they see a touch of personalization and branding. By following these few easy-to-understand steps, you too can be the proud owner of an upscale, bleeding-edge Twitter site!
Several factors must be considered when creating a custom background (the following suggestions and instructions are based on the use of Adobe Photoshop and presume familiarity; if needed, the reader is referred to the Adobe Photoshop tutorials site.

Size
There are two sides of the background which can be customized; right and left (note: the entire background will be one image). By keeping the graphic content of the right side width at 210 pixels (2.917 inches), and the left at 217 pixels (3.014 inches), all branding elements should fit within these two distances from the edges; height should be kept at 809 pixels (11.236 inches). The entire customized Twitter background graphic should be 1439 pixels (19.986 inches) width by 809 pixels (11.236 inches) height. As this is a Web document, resolution should be 72 pixels/inch. The resultant branding message will then be visible in both the “new” Twitter interface as well as the current version. While the space above the feed could conceivably be utilized in the overall creation of the graphic, this could prove problematic. Nevertheless, adventurous designers may wish to toy with this concept.

Background color
The option available that can be used to match the customized background color. It can be found in the Twitter navbar (located at the top of the site) by accessing Settings > Design > Change design colors. When the Change design colors option is accessed, and background, text, links, etc., are chosen, a color selector is provided for the user. In the selector is a dialog box wherein a hexadecimal value can be entered. This value is easily determined in Photoshop, and by matching the values no difference will be detected between the customized background and that supplied via the Twitter interface, as inequalities in coverage may occur.

Sidebar color
By matching the sidebar color to that of the background color (process described above), the information provided by Twitter in the sidebar section, e.g. name, number of tweets, following, followers, et al., will appear to float freely (note: by using a white background color [hex value = #ffffff], the feed itself will float; selecting both background and sidebar colors as white will eliminate page bordering altogether – this is how the Grannelle Twitter site has been fashioned [when employing this method, the sidebar border {appears as a delineation between the feed and the sidebar} can be eliminated by changing the color value to white also, if desired]).

Text and Graphics
All data such as hypertext, phone numbers, etc., are part of the total graphic. They cannot be accessed, copied, or pasted. However, by providing matching information accessible from the sidebar, such as that supplied for the Bio and Web headings (found in the uppermost portion of the sidebar), constancy can be achieved. Repetition of use of the profile picture is also helpful for uniformity. Twitter text and link colors can be selected from the Change design colors preferences to accent those in the customized background, though care should be taken to use contrasting hues. Bear in mind that users experiencing color vision deficiency (color blindness) may encounter difficulty in distinguishing certain color selections.

Total File Size and Format
The total size of the file must be smaller than 800k. GIF, JPEG (JPG), and PNG file formats are acceptable. While the customized Twitter background graphic can be tiled (repeated across the page), it is not suggested for this method.

Using Photoshop, simply create a document with the aforementioned measurements, building content for the left and right sides of the graphic and choosing background color. Include text information, pictures, and other desired images and illustrations. Adopting a consistently matching background color, create a new document, again with previously described dimensions. Copy and paste the left and right (merged) images onto the appropriate sides of the image. Save the final product. The finished background can be uploaded in the Design section, Change background image, following the same procedure as formerly instructed. By playing with and trying out these ideas, users can have a polished and professional Twitter site!