Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected in real-time, where you can send messages up to 140 characters called tweets. Tweets are posted on your profile page and send out to all your followers’ timeline.

When you are only following a couple of people like close friends and family, it is easy to keep refreshing the Twitter home page for updates. But when you start following a couple hundred and also use Twitter for business, you have to use this tools to help you keep up, tweet smarter and save your precious time.

1. TweetDeck – Our personal favorite! TweetDeck gives you the last 200 tweets made by Twitters you are following and organizes your @replies and Direct Messages (DMs) in different columns. You can also group people you are following into different groups/columns (family, friends…) to easily keep up with their tweets. Reply, retweet and DM with just one click!
2. Twitpic – This tool allows you to share pictures on Twitter.
3. TweetLater – You can easily schedule your tweets for a later time, get emails with your keyword alerts and send instant “Thank You” messages to your new followers with TweetLater. If you have more than one Twitter account, this tool is a must have.
4. Twitter Timer – Follow @timer, send a DM with a number (minutes) and message and Twitter Timer will remind you to do that important task you keep forgetting. For example, DM @timer with the message 60 business meeting and it will remind you to go to your business meeting in 60 minutes.
5. GroupTweet – You can send messages to a specific group of your followers with GroupTweet. This is a great tool for business groups since you can make its settings private and exchange information via tweets safely.

Twitter is hot at the moment and even celebrities are tweeting. If you have been living in a cave for the past six months and still don’t have a twitter account, you can sign up here. Don’t forget to follow BumpShack on Twitter!