Hi! Welcome to Wonder Tools — a weekly newsletter about useful digital sites, apps and resources. This week’s post👇 is about tools that make Twitter better. Read on for Twitter lists and apps to try, plus useful tools for drafting and reading Twitter threads. - Jeremy
Twitter Lists
Picking a few lists to follow is more efficient than scouring for thousands of individual Twitter accounts.
Finding lists on topics that you care about is a handy way to keep up with topics without having to find and follow tons of individual accounts.
For a good list of lists, visit Storyful’s excellent list collection. Pick a topic you care about, from comedy and Oscars to human rights and space. They’ve picked thousands of valuable Twitterers and organized them by topic.
A few more lists I like
Verified world leaders 64 global heads of state, curated by Twitter’s team.
COVID experts Expert epidemiologists, virologists, physicians, and researchers, curated by my colleague and mentor Jeff Jarvis.
Media News. A list curated by Michelle Nicolosi.
A few of my own lists
Newsletter tools for creators and consumers.
Useful digital tools Updates on sites, apps & software
Slick site-building tools for novices and non-techies
More lists I’ve made & follow are here. Over the past 12 years I’ve used Twitter more than other social platforms, though lately I find less value in social content, more value in books. Lists, though, do make Twitter more efficient.
Catch up with recent posts on tools for running a program or for wasting less time or getting up to speed on Reddit in 2021
Twitter Apps
Sponsored Message
Circleboom
Circleboom Twitter is an all-in-one Twitter management tool that lets you find inactive, fake, spambot friends and followers on Twitter and remove them in bulk. Also, you can search hashtags and keywords on users’ profiles, tweets, and bios to find a targeted audience. You can also get helpful insights about follower/following growth, tweet stats, gender/language distribution, the best time to tweet, and interest targeting. Last but not least, you can mass delete your tweets, retweets, likes, and Twitter archive in one tool.
Circleboom Publish, on the other hand, lets you schedule and automate tweets, Twitter threads, and social media posts for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google My Business. Circleboom has also an iOS app.
Twitterific
Twitterific lets you open a search tab for users to mention while composing a Tweet. It has a thread mode for spooling out a series of posts. And it lets you mute people, hashtags, or domains to avoid trolls, spoilers or other unwanted tweets. Free for iOS and Mac; bonus features with a paid upgrade.
Tweeten
Tweeten aims to improve on Tweetdeck, though they’re similar. Both let you set up a dashboard with customized columns for viewing lists, search results, hashtags or whatever else you follow. Free for Windows, Mac, or Chrome.
Buffer
Buffer lets you post to Twitter like you water plants. In batches. With the free plan, you can put up to 10 future posts in your queue. Buffer then posts them to your Twitter account — and/or up to two other social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn— on a schedule of your choice. Helpfully, you don’t have to choose a time manually for each post. Set up your preferred schedule, and it will post for you mid-morning and mid-afternoon each day in your target time zone or whatever else you choose.
Price and platforms: For me, Buffer’s free plan is fine. I use it on the Web, via a free Chrome extension. Whenever I want to draft a social media post, I can just right-click on any Web page or click a bookmarklet button in my browser bar and that link is automatically added to my Twitter queue (or other social platform, like LinkedIn), along with whatever comment I want to add.
Mobile too: Free for iOS and Android, the app lets you share anything you’re reading, watching or listening. For pro users, $15 a month lets you post to up to 8 social accounts and have up to 100 posts in your queue.
Bonus fact: Salaries are 100% transparent at Buffer, explained here. You can see what employees are paid in this spreadsheet. Amazing level of transparency.
Hootsuite 🦉
Hootsuite is a classic social media management tool that still works well. The free plan, similar to Buffer’s, enables three social accounts and up to 30 scheduled messages. You can use it to:
Schedule posts. You can draft a bunch of messages and have them published at peak reading times rather than late at night or on weekends.
Look at a dashboard of your social accounts, like Tweetdeck. While Tweetdeck works only for Twitter content, Hootsuite works with multiple social platforms.
Track topics you follow, lists, hashtags and more by creating “boards” that highlight whatever’s important to you.
Why use it: Having a social dashboard like Hootsuite, Tweeten or Tweetdeck allows you to scan through a variety of accounts, lists, hashtags, etc. It’s like watching TV from a bank of monitors rather than a single screen. For some people it’s overwhelming. For others, it’s efficient.
Twubs #️⃣
Twubs is another old service that still works, for searching for hashtags. I recently looked up Twitter chats on journalism here, and you can find popular hashtags for conferences, events, or topics, like music.
Tweetroot
This simple free app lets you create a quick word cloud out of anyone’s Tweets or from any hashtag. It’s useful for a quick visual take on the key words people are sharing about any event or topic. iOS only.
Phoetic
This iPhone app lets you pick any image and then turn it into word cloud with any words you choose. You can use it to turn a Tweet into a picture, or turn any phrase into a visual. 99 cents. iOS only.
Draft Twitter Threads 🧵
Twitter threads are for the early ‘20s what blogs were for the early ‘00s. So multiple new tools have popped up for threading Tweets. Buzzfeed even created a listicle about 17 entertaining threads. Here are three tools for creating Twitter threads and a couple for reading them.
Chirr App
Create Twitter threads free with this site. Paste or type as much text in as you’d like. Chirr chops it into Tweet-length chunks for you. It’ll number the Tweets if you want. And a Chrome extension lets you automagically turn something you’ve written online into a thread.
For $2.50 a month the plus version lets you save drafts and add images. The pro version for $12 a month lets you schedule threads and adds analytics.
Thread Creator
This new alternative is similar to Chirr but its free version has features that Chirr charges for, such as saving an unlimited number of drafts, image uploads, and scheduling threads.
Typefully
This Web app has the slickest design of these thread creators. So far it’s completely free. You can save drafts, schedule threads and add images. There’s a dark mode if that’s your jam. Soon: number Tweets in a thread.
Reading Twitter Threads 🧶
Threader app
Threader works in your browser — add a bookmarklet to your browser and you can click it to compile any batch of connected Tweets in a readable format. Or download the free iOS app to compile threads on your phone.
Another option for reading threads is just to paste its link into Threadreaderapp.com or mythreadreader.com. For those who wonder if you need a separate site to read a lengthy thread, mythreadthreader has the following explanation:
“How would you like if you have to read a book where there is one line per page? Twitter threads are same, you can read up to 256 characters, and have to shift your focus again to the next tweet in the thread.”
Twitter’s 15 Year Anniversary 🎉
This week marks 15 years since Jack Dorsey posted the sketch below to Flickr. It echoes the status messages once popular pre-Twitter on AIM & ICQ.
p.s. visual flashback: 25 old editorial cartoons about Twitter posted in 2009
Twitter Spaces 🐣
Join me at 1pm ET today, Thursday, March 25 if you’d like to try out Twitter Spaces. We’ll talk about Twitter apps and features, including its newest feature — live audio rooms. At 1pm ET Thursday look for a Tweet from me — @jeremycaplan — with the link to the live room. Like Clubhouse, a fast-growing audio platform, Twitter Spaces is still invite-only, but it’s expected to open up broadly next month. One tip: to find Twitter Spaces live sessions to join, type in “twitter.com/i/spaces” into Twitter’s search bar.
What an amazing collection of Twitter tools. I hope you'll find space in it for a freshly built one we have released just a couple of weeks ago. It is called Murmel (https://murmel.social/) and is basically a way to cut the noise and get the essential bits of one's Twitter timeline. We'd love to see you try it out and give us your feedback.