Most of us are on the hunt for better and more creative ways to use Twitter.

Here are two tools we use at G7 that might expand your Twitter impact. These tools are free and will help you position yourself as an expert in your field.

1. InboxQ – What questions are people asking on Twitter?

InboxQ is a powerful and simple way to put your ear to the social media tracks of your industry. People are asking questions on Twitter all the time and unfortunately those questions usually go unanswered. With InboxQ you can use keywords to find out what questions people are asking and take the opportunity to respond to them.

For example, let’s say that you have a blog on skiing and reviewing ski gear, you might want to see what questions people are asking out there. Your keywords might be “skiing,” “ski gear,” and “new skis.”

Run the search and you’ll see what questions people have been asking on Twitter with those keywords.

Reply to those you want and save that search as a campaign so you can come back to it as frequently as you like. By pursuing and engaging other Twitter users you will greatly expand your community and impact.

 

2. Tweriod – Find out the best times to tweet based on when your followers are online.

Tweriod is a great tool that analyzes your Twitter followers’ online activity. Tweriod produces a graph of when the most people are online. From this analysis you can determine the best time to send your tweets. For example, using our G7 account I can see most people are online between 2 p.m. and 10 p.m. with a peak at 8 p.m. For the greatest involvement we will schedule our tweets to send between those times.

What’s even better, is if you have a buffer.com account (which you should) you can update your buffer account with your optimal tweeting times. This is a metric you will want to review every week or two to make sure that you’re maximizing your Twitter impact.

There you have it! Two free and easy tools to help you dominate your Twitter account. Have you tried these tools before? Can you suggest any others? Let us know!