Tweetlater at TweetLater is a fantastic tool to use with Twitter. It allows you to schedule tweets for various times of the day. So how can this be of use to you?

Well you need to remember that the Twitter audience is constantly changing and the tweetstream occurs quite fast. The more people someone follows, the greater the number of tweets appearing and they won’t read them all, I promise you. It just isn’t possible.  By using Tweetlater, you have a much greater chance of catching people′s attention throughout the day and in different time zones.

Let’s say you have written a post on your blog and you want to drive some traffic there.  Rather than tweeting the link and subject once, you can do it every hour for 24 hours if you like using Tweetlater.  I’m sure you can see the power of this in terms of driving traffic or getting noticed.

There is a free and a professional version of Tweetlater. Start out with the free version and then if you need it, upgrade to the professional version when you are ready.

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SocialToo at  is a useful automated tool for Twitter. At Social Too, you can set your account up to do some autopilot things for you.

First of all, you can set SocialToo up to automatically follow everyone who follows you.  This can take the drudgery out of checking all your new followers and then going and adding them to your own list in order to reciprocate.

You can also set up SocialToo to send an automatic Direct Message to people who follow you. Don′t do it! Automatic Direct Messages are absolutely hated by most of the Twitter community, particularly experienced users because they can pick them a mile off.  It’s a sterile and rude way of starting out a relationship with new followers.

The backlash against this has largely been caused because many newbies, and some old hands too, were setting up an auto Direct Message that basically said, “Hello, thanks for following me. Now go and visit my sales page at http://….. “. I′m sure you get the picture.  I can′t think of any worse way to start a relationship with a new follower on Twitter.  In any sort of business, you build relationships before you try and sell someone something and this is even more relevant in the social media space.

SocialToo will also provide you with an email every day of all your new followers and those that have unfollowed you as well.

Another function of SocialToo is that it will automatically unfollow anyone who unfollows you.  Personally I don’t think this is a bad thing. If people aren’t interested in you any longer, then are you really interested in them?  If you really want to keep the updates from someone, just go and follow them back when you see their name on your unfollows email each day.

Technorati Tags: automated tool for Twitter, SocialToo, Twitter community

Now that you’re all set up, let’s get into some advanced Tweeting tips and applications that can really power your Twitter usage up.Twitter Backgrounds

We discussed earlier about setting up your Twitter background so that it didn’t just look like the default Twitter page.  Leaving it like that shows a lack of care on your part. You need to distinguish yourself from the crowd and that attracts more followers, or at the very least impresses people with your professionalism.

Now if you’re a bit of a Photoshop whiz, then you can do your own background, full of bells and whistles and load it up to your Twitter profile. But if you’re not, or you just want to save time, then there are some sites out there that will do them for you automagically.

To find these sites, the best thing to do is to simply Google “twitter backgrounds” and you will find quite a few sites offering this service for free. My personal favorite is Twitbacs where you can get some great backgrounds.However, that said, if you want to do your own fiddling in Photoshop, you can get some great layouts in PSD format from Twitbacs

Technorati Tags: Advanced Tweeting Tips, Tweeting tips, Twitter Backgrounds

Grader is on Twitter as @grader, but also online at http://twitter.grader.com/ and is a site of some interest. As you get going on Twitter, you can get “ranked” by Grader on a score out of 100. It is based on some secret algorithm apparently so people can’t game the system.

Apart from that aspect of Grader, you can have a look at who the top Tweeple are in a particular area or even by topic using the search function.

When you use the search function, it will list the Tweeple by their score in descending order. For example, if you search for “gardening” on Grader, you will get a list of all the top 100 people interested in gardening on Twitter.  You can see their “bio” from their Twitter account and if you click on their Grader score, it will take you to their Twitter account from where you can follow them. Naturally, you must already be logged in to Twitter yourself to follow anyone.

Mr Tweet at www.mrtweet.net is another way of gaining new followers.  All you have to do is follow Mr Tweet on Twitter and your tweets will be monitored for content and then you will get a Direct Message from “him”. You then go to the site and login and you will get a list of suggested people.  You will also get a list of people who are following you that you aren′t following so you can then follow them if you choose.

It’s a really nifty little site and worth registering at.

Technorati Tags: Direct Message Twitter, Mr Tweet, Mr Tweet on Twitter