Handy Twitter Tools for Midlife New Media Newbies

Thanks to all who participated in yesterday's special Q&A session about our "New Media" teachings to date!!

As a reminder, at NewPrimeTime.com, we are on a quest to help guide midlifers to a great second half of life.  Our work originated with our affiliation with The Purpose Project through the University of Minnesota.  As we have worked with midlifers seeking their next "purposeful" career, we found that most midlifers….and particularly midlife entrepreneurs are not yet using the power of the web to spread their teachable point of view, promote their business, and learn….so we embarked on helping midlifers get comfortable with these awesome "new media" tools.  We are NOT experts, but are midlife users of the web who simply want to help the rest of you through our experiences and learnings.

Yesterday, we held our 7th "Big Picture" New Media session….which was a unique Q&A session to answer questions that our students have had from the sessions to date.  We talked about a number of neat tools and people wanted me to "blog" about them to make it easier to grab them….so as promised, here are some of the handy sites that help you use Twitter most effectively and efficiently:

1) www.tweetlater.com This tool has quite a few options that you can choose to use. I use the feature that "auto-follows" and then have it send a direct message to anyone who follows me. I have found that if you start using Twitter by selecting some people who YOU want to follow (based on YOUR interests)…then you will find that most of the people who find you and follow you are relevant to your interests. (although yes, you will get some pure hard sales types )

2) www.search.twitter.com This is a basic search tool that enables you to enter terms or names in a search box to find "tweets" in Twitter that match the terms that you enter.

3) http://twitter.grader.com (Note that www.twitter.grader.com won't work). This service has a rating tool for people on Twitter. So, it is a good tool to use when you are trying to determine the quality of people you may want to follow. Note this tool also has a search and a few other features.

4) www.twitip.com This is is a neat site that has recommended Twitter tips and tools as suggested by readers. It is a site edited by Darren Rowse…who is an excellent blogging resource.

5) www.ping.fm This is an awesome site that can post ALL of your social media and other sites with one post from you.  You can update status updates (the 140 character updates for Twitter  and Facebook etc. )  AND you can actually take blog posts and automatically post to "notes" fields in sites that allow longer notes (like Facebook).

If you missed any of our past sessions (or want to take in any of Richard Leider's sessions that we have produced for him), you can find them by under "Programs" at the top of our home page under our header  in the navigation bar.   Or you can CLICK HERE to go to them.

Have a great day!

Barb