These 5 Twitter toolsboost your online sales

Twitter is already one of the top social networking sites in the world, a real-time virtual universe unto itself where users gather to share news, videos, photos, and most importantly, their thoughts in 140 characters. Now, users can shop for their favorite things on Twitter too! Last month, Twitter began testing a “buy” button that will allow users to buy a product in just a few clicks. The feature is only available on mobile versions of Twitter at the moment.

For small businesses, the ability to buy products on Twitter is a game changer. With over 271 million monthly active users, Twitter is now a revenue stream that can help small businesses boost their bottom line. With this new feature, small businesses will need analytics and other tools to track sales, customer buying trends, best times to tweet and consumer behavior. To that end, here are five free tools to help you do just that!

▪  Followerwonk: This free tool gives you invaluable analytics and insight into your Twitter followers, including who they are, when they tweet and where they are from. It will also help you find Twitter users who are influential and tweet about the products and services you sell. You can compare user behavior and track followers according to a number of different criteria. The tool produces helpful charts that you can print. There are free and paid plans and new customers can sign up for a 30-free trial. Get Followerwonk here — http://followerwonk.com/

▪ Hashtagify.me: This free analytics tool allows you to track how your hashtags are performing on Twitter. The tool produces in-depth analysis of the hashtags you use and will give you the insight you need to tweak your strategy if needed. Get Hashtagify.me here – http://hashtagify.me/

▪  Tweriod: If you’ve ever wondered about the best time to tweet so that you get the attention of your followers, then Tweriod could be perfect tool for you. This tool is an app analyzes your small business Twitter feeds and those of up to 1,000 of your followers. Tweriod is free, but there are paid plans available for as little as $3.99 per month. Get Tweriod here – http:// www.tweriod.com/

▪ Twitterfeed: This free tool can be used to automate the content you publish on your site using RSS feeds to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. This allows small businesses to broaden their customer base by exposing their products and services to a larger audience and can even track the performance of the content in real-time. You can set up a feed with this tool in just two quick steps. First, enter your site’s URL and Twitterfeed will grab your RSS feed from your site.

Then, just choose the social networks were you want to distribute the content on your feed.

There are free and paid plans with this platform. Get Twitterfeed here — http:// twitterfeed.com

▪ SumAll: This free tool aggregates information from your like Twitter and Facebook and sends you daily and weekly emails that tracks important metrics like retweets, shares, and reach, all from one account. This tool is free to use and there are also premium plans available for purchase. Get SumAll here – http://SumAll.com.

This story was originally published October 19, 2014 at 3:00 PM with the headline "These 5 Twitter toolsboost your online sales."