Nine Free Twitter apps your business needs

Many businesses today have their own Twitter account. They're used to releasing news, advertising products and sales, and interacting with potential customers and established clients. However, many underutilize Twitter's capabilities. They will use the organic Twitter features - perhaps a Twitter dashboard like HootSuite as well - but nothing more.

With a little digging, business can find some great, relatively unknown apps to maximize the effectiveness of their Twitter account. Stop digging, folks, 'cause now they're all right here!

Top 3 Statistical & Analysis tools

• Twitturly — Tracks and ranks URL usages in the Twittersphere.

• TweetStats — Tracks your tweeting frequency and displays your stats graphically (alternatively, try TwitterCounter).

• Twitter Grader — Grades the influence your Twitter profile has, and allows you to strengthen your weaknesses (alternatively, try twInfluence).

Top 3 Productivity & Streamlining tools

• Twittercal — Connects your Twitter to your Google Calender, enabling easy event-adding, internal centralization, and more.

• Twitzu — Makes it easy to promote your business, special offers, promotions and events.

• Twitter Alerts — Everyone likes Google Alerts. This app is little different, keeping you continually up to date on mentions of not just your profile's name, but its associated products, services, sales and events.

Three Special Mentions

• Twittonary — A business looks old and outdated if they're not keeping up with modern internet lingo. Twittionary keeps business on top of things (alterantively, try twenglish).

• Twitterless — Twitterless tells you who stops following you, graphs your follower history, and can display the information in a variety of useful views.

• Twonvert — Allows you to easily convert your tweets into SMS shorthand language, effectively saying more with less characters (Twitter restricts characters per tweet to 140). Alternatively, try twi8r.