Useful Twitter Applications
There are a plethora of app’s available for Twitter now and plenty more on the way – some more useful than others.

Most are free – not sure how the developers are monetizing them. Some offer upgrades to "professional"  accounts where you can access more features, but often the free versions pack a lot of value. These app’s will save you time and help you become more efficient with Twitter, which answers a common complaint I hear from people just getting started, "I don’t have time to answer emails let alone tweet".

If you take the time up front to learn to use these, and/or other apps, and set up systems to manage your online communications you will find a positive return on the time invested. 

Hootsuite: Recently released their 2.0 version which is a huge improvement. Here are a few of the features I like/take advantage of:

• Nice new tabbed layout
• Set up multiple accounts
• Set up multiple editors/publishers
• Create multiple columns for things like @mentions, DMs searches, Groups
• Love the pop-up info on fellow tweeters
• Schedule tweets for hours/days in advance.
• Track response metrics (clicks on links in tweets) including some demographic data
• I have to admit that while I can be fairly critical I have found any glitches in the new release…yet.

TweetLater: The name suggests this application can be used for tweeting later, but I like it for managing other aspects of tweeting:

• Can also manage multiple accounts (like Hootsuite)
• Save and reuse tweet drafts
• Create criteria to automate whether you want to follow someone or not
• Set up welcome DMs for people who follow you
• Automatically unfollow those who unfollow you
• Track keywords and get email alerts
• Schedule @replies and DMs for when the person is online (I haven’t seen this offered by other apps)

Twitpic: this app is a little more straightforward. It allows you to upload and share photos from your computer, phone or the website directly to your twitter account. Twitpic is useful for:

• Sharing life as it happens by uploading photos from your phone/mobile device
• A fun way to market your business and/or products by posting shots of what’s happening in the store
• Track how many views your photo has received
• Viral opportunities: enables other users to add comments which goes out on Twitter
• Another way to create inbound links to your site

Blip: this is another fun app.

• A "blip" is a combination of a song and a short message that accompanies it. You create a blip by searching for a song that you want to hear (or you want your followers to hear), then add a short message and submit. Your blip then goes out onto your Twitter stream with a link to the song.
• Here’s what I’m listening to right now http://blip.fm/~ba1jo 
• Depending on the industry you’re in Blip.fm is probably not going to be that useful in terms of business. 

So those are just a few of my favourite app’s. How about you – what are your favourite Twitter apps?