With the emergence of>Twitter.com as the fastest-growing social networking site on the Internet in 2008, an increasing number of free Twitter applications to enhance the service have been brought out by software geeks. Many of these tools focus on helping active twitter users to manage their messages, their list of followers and their list of people they are following.

So if you want to get more out of Twitter and hone it into a lean, mean social network building machine, check out some of these free applications and find out what you have been missing…

1. TweetBeep.com: This is a great tool for keeping tabs on your keywords, and any URLs whose usage you want to track on Twitter. You can follow other people’s conversations and monitor who is tweeting your website, or taking your name in vain. You can be kept updated bike Tweetbeep every day or every hour. Tweet beep will give you the ability to respond quickly to messages in your niche or join in conversations that interest you.

2. TweetLater.com: Despite the fact that Twitter seems to be set up for spontaneous and instantaneous messaging, some people will find it useful to plan their messages ahead of schedule and program them to go out at specified times. This is great for releasing announcements and updates at regular intervals during the day when you will be busy doing other stuff. As with Tweet beep, you can set up keyword tracking.

Another useful feature of Tweetlater is that it permits you to automatically reciprocate when someone follows you. You can also set up a welcome message that will be automatically sent out to your new followers.

3. SocialToo.com: This service is sends you an e-mail each day with a list of people who started following you and people who stopped following you the previous day. Just as with Tweetlater, you can set up welcome messages for your new followers.

With Socialtoo.com you can set up online surveys and polls, and send them out to Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

4. TwitterCounter.com: use this tool to check the number of people who are following you, or anybody else, over a certain period of time. You can plug in two different Twitter user names and compared their stats. Twitter account also predicts how many followers you will have in the future, based on your past performance. If you have a lot of followers you might want to post that Twitter counter widget on your website and blog.

5. Twitter grade.com: This tool will give you feedback about the power of your network, how often you update and how complete your profile is and gives you a percentage score which you can then Tweet out on Twitter!

6. Tweetstats.com: this attractive tool sets out to your twitter posting trends in a series of coloured bar graphs. Check out when you Tweet the most, or you replied to the most, what time of day you tweak the most and so on. If you like what you see you can share it with everybody else by tweeting it!

7. Tweetdeck.com: currently in beta version, this is a downloadable program that allows users to sort their tweets into topic specific groups so that they can better monitor and control the information flow and easily catch up with all the messages that have come in.

USE A URL SHORTENER

Another type of free application you can use to get a bit more out of Twitter is our URL shortening service. These have been around for far longer than Twitter and you can use them to convert long URLs into much shorter ones which is good news for your tweets, where every single character counts. A short URL will free up some characters for your main message. While you are in the act of trying to shorten your URL, you might as well find the shortest URL shorten the possible. One that is hard to beat for brevity is http://is.gd.

As you can see there is a whole raft of free Twitter applications available to help you get more out of your Twitter.com account, and doubtless many more applications are being rolled out even as you read this. While these free services offer many benefits to the Twitter user, in the end the results you get from Twitter depend upon the quality and consistency of your tweets.