If you are like me then you will use Twitter as a way to communicate with friends, colleagues and other people in the industry across the world. Twitter has experienced massive growth this year and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

For home workers, Twitter is a great way to meet new people, to chat and share ideas as well as share experiences.

The biggest problem with Twitter is frankly the website. There are tools out there that offer far more functionality than the Twitter website that can make your Twitter experience more enjoyable and less frustrating! If Twitter eventually brings in a ‘Retweet’ function, the website will become a million times better!

Anyway, here are my suggestions for tools for Twitter:

TweetDeck

A very popular programme that is available on all platforms (including iPhone). This is a desktop application that enables you to post new tweets, view messages, replies as well as having the benefit of having TwitPic built in.

TwitPic

If you don’t use TweetDeck, mentioned above, then you can use TwitPic’s website to upload and share photos.

Twhirl

This is an alternative to TweetDeck. This too is available across different platforms and will happily run in the background, updating you on new tweets. The interface isnt as nice as TweetDeck but this programme does have the benefits of monitoring multiple Twitter accounts at the same time.

Nearby Tweets

So you can see who is Tweeting near you, enter in your address and radius and it will show you the messages that have been posted recently near you.

Retweet Radar

This is a trend monitoring tool. Load up the website and you are presented with a tag cloud of all the popular topics doing their rounds on Twitter.

My Cleanr

This is a web based application to ‘clean your Twitter contact list’. It gives you the ability of removing inactive accounts.

Tweepular

I like this programme. Its very funky to look at and you get a moonwalking bird on it! This is an account management system that will let you bulk remove friends and even check if people you are following arent following you back.

Friend or Follow

Who are you following that’s not following you back? Who’s following you that you’re not following back? Find out!

Monitter

It’s a twitter monitor, it lets you “monitter” the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying.

Twitter Counter

A tool that you can use on your website to show how many Twitter followers you have. Also produces a nice little graph to show how your Twitter follower count has increased (or decreased!).

There are loads of other Twitter related programmes out there… this is just my pick! Please share your links below!