HootSuite: one of the best social media clients you can buy. You can not only use it to manage your tweets but also your Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social profiles.

Buffer: one of the most exciting social media management tools around. It lets you add the interesting stories you find to your buffer and have them shared on Twitter and Facebook throughout your days.

Social Oomph: this tool lets you schedule your tweets, track your keywords, manage your followers, and handle your DMs.

Twitter Feed: one of the oldest Twitter tools around. It allows you to add your favorite RSS feeds and have them posted every few hours. This is helpful if you want to schedule new tweets without you having to do much other than feeding it a few RSS feeds.

Timely: Timely lets you publish your tweets to your timeline at the right time. Just add your tweets and these guys will find the best time slots for them.

You don’t want to reschedule all your tweets but doing it once in a while is not a bad idea. It can reduce your load and maximize the effects of your tweets. The above tools let you schedule your tweets in a painless fashion.

Plus Minus: a handy tool that lets you choose which circles show up in your stream.

Extended Share for Google Plus: allows you to share stories on Facebook, Twitter and other networks from Google+.

G+me for Google Plus: this helps you get a better sense for all the content shared in your stream. It collapses your posts and can hide comments too.

RSS Share for Google Plus: integrates Google Reader into Google+. Makes sharing top stories from Google Reader with your circles easier.

Google Translate for Google+: have a lot of friends who don’t always speak your language? This tool lets you translate your Google+ stream.

Google+ is still a very young social network. But it is well worth being involved in for businesses. The above extensions make it possible to manage your Google+ stream more productivity.

Klout: works for Twitter and Facebook. It determines what your true reach is on Twitter. It also shows you how influential people are interacting with your account on that site.

Twitalyzer: shows you whether you are on the right track with your efforts by grading your account. It takes into account various factors such as the number of followers, frequency of tweets, and retweets. It also tells you what you can do to take your Twitter efforts to the next level.

Visibli: this is an analytics tool for Twitter. Just enter your username to find out how people have interacted with the links you have shared on Twitter.

Twitter Grader: one of the better Twitter measurement tools around. It provides you with a snapshot of your Twitter account. It also tells you the steps you can take to make your Twitter presence more powerful.

Tweet Reach: want to figure out how many people are you are reaching with your tweets? Tweet Reach breaks down your Twitter content to give you an idea on that.

While Twitter is a very powerful social network, you don’t want to be on it just for the sake of being there. The above tools can help you measure your results and show you areas you can work on to improve your Twitter presence.

Tweroid: if you are tweeting for business, you may as well do it when people are listening. That’s what this tool offers. It shows you the best times to tweet.

Buffer for Twitter: a handy tool to have to schedule tweets ahead of time. Just collect stories as you go and add them to your queue.

Twilert: keeping track of your brand on Twitter can become quite a task especially if you don’t have the man-power to closely manage it. This tool can help you get a handle on that.

Backtweets: tweeting just for the sake of doing it is not a smart idea for your business. This tool shows you how many people you reach with your efforts on Twitter.

Hootsuite: a powerful web client for Twitter, Facebook. LinkedIn, and other social networks. Business owners can use this to reduce noise, keep track of their lists, schedule tweets ahead of time, and do much more.

Managing all your Twitter accounts by yourself can be quite a task. The above tools allow you to do the job in a more productive fashion.

Formulists: the best Twitter list tool hands down. It helps you automate the process of organizing your followers and conversations using lists. It can even show you who has unfollowed you recently. A wonderful idea by a wonderful team of entrepreneurs.

ListiMonkey: it’s like Google alerts but it works for your Twitter lists. Helps you find out when someone in your Twitter lists has tweeted about a specific topic.

Tlists: a search engine for Twitter lists. It lets you find the top lists on any topic. Following top lists can help you better keep up with the developments in your niche.

Listorious: a powerful portal that can help you find the top lists on Twitter. It is a great tool for research and development (for goods and services both).

DoesFollow List Check: a simple tool that shows you whether you or someone you are interested in is included in a specific list. It can save you time managing your followers.

Twitter lists are quite powerful if you use them the right way. The above tools should help you save time and get more out of your existing tools.

Klout: you are still going to need a social media strategist after using this tool, but Klout can show you how influential you are and things that you may be doing wrong.

Flipboard for iPad: Flipboard is a very fun tool to use for business owners who want to keep up with the latest developments in their worlds right on their iPad.

Tal.ki: adds a dynamic forum to your website, which your visitors can log on to using their social media accounts on Twitter or Facebook.

Rank Speed: combines results from the blogosphere and twitterverse and lets you do a sentiment analysis for results in your niche.

ClickMeter: you can’t have a social media strategy if you do not keep track of the links that you post to your accounts. ClickMeter (which is used to detect click fraud too) is just the tracking tool you’ll need.

Getting the most out of Twitter for your business is more than just posting links and communicating with your prospects. Tracking and analyzing your efforts should be at the top of your agenda too.

You don’t have to be a designer or pay a huge amount of money to get a custom Twitter page designed for your business. If it’s not your core competency, there is no reason not to outsource it. Here are 5 places you can pick up high quality premium Twitter backgrounds:

Twitr Backgrounds: the service has been used by many top Twitterers around the world. It promises your very first design in just 3 days. Businesses can always send back their designs for modifications to get the design that is perfect for them.

Twitart: they not only offer custom Twitter background, they also offer Twitter Avatar design too. Offer some of the best designs we have seen on Twitter.

Social Identities: your one stop shop for all your branding needs. It offers Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and landing page branding services.

Tweet Designs: this website offers Twitter, avatar, and Facebook design services. It is certainly worth checking out (though I prefer the first two).

Tweet With Style: it offers more affordable custom Twitter backgrounds for your business profile. Unlimited design changes and 48 hour design delivery are big positives.

Always check the previous works of the company you intend to work with to make sure you are signing up for the right service. Paying $50-$100 for a Twitter background may seem unnecessary, but it does make a big difference.

The social media world is expanding fast. Just a few months ago, there were a lot of people who were skeptical about Twitter and Facebook. Now you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn’t heard of these services. There are plenty of ways to start a business on these sites. If you take time to get yourself familiar with the API offered by Twitter and Facebook, you can create real solutions that people want to use. You obviously have to identify a need and provide value with your service, but these APIs can be easily utilized to create killer products for social media sites such as Twitter.

Twitter is growing really fast, which is why starting a Twitter-based business makes sense these days. If you know someone who knows the API or can hire someone to write code for you, the sky’s the limit on what products you can make for Twitter. Here are 10 Twitter business ideas to get you started:

• Local Services: creating geo-based Twitter solutions is nothing new. But the market is still not saturated. No matter where you are around the world, you can create a Twitter-based service and attract Twitter users in your area. Or you can go for it all and create a craigslist-like service for Twitter.
• Status Update: creating a software solution that makes it easy to update multiple social media accounts in one shot is still one of the best ways to gain some traction in this business (e.g. Pinging service).
• Desktop Clients: we have over a dozen of desktop clients that let tweeters tweet from their PC more effectively. At the same time, there is always room for innovation in this area (TweetDeck).
• Analytics Tools: social media analytics is gaining traction slowly and more people will use SM analytics solutions to measure ROI for their social media campaigns. The sky’s the limit in this area. You can go for simple, freemium services or create premium analytics solution (with the proper investment).
• Automation Tools: there are a lot of businesses and individuals that prefer automating parts of their social media campaigns. Targeting them could be lucrative (TweetAdder).
• Account Management Tools: letting people manage their account more efficiently on Twitter is yet another way to make money on Twitter. Though make sure you figure out your business model before going online (Hootsuite).
• Mobile Apps: offering a mobile solution for iPhone, Android, and other top mobile platforms is yet another way to build business on Twitter. It’s not as hard as it looks as long as you have the right developers.
• International Twitter Solutions: have you seen tweeters who talk in foreign languages on Twitter? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could develop a solution for them to help them tweet and connect with others more effectively (e.g. a Twitter translation service)?
• Twitter Training: what if you don’t want to write code? You can still make money on Twitter by letting others know how to get started on Twitter. You can also offer backgrounds, buttons, and all kinds of little solutions and monetize on the side.
• Twitter Portals: if you are into building content portals, why not use Twitter to build more dynamic ones? Lots of content to take advantage of.

As you can seen, building a business on Twitter is not that hard. You obviously do want to pay attention to business 101 concepts, but as long as you identify a need that is not being addressed in your niche, there are plenty of opportunities to make money on Twitter.

Your take: please share your Twitter ideas here.

Twitter has not yet rolled out the feature yet, so not everyone can take advantage of the lists. But the lucky ones who can will see a new number next to their number of followers. That number will show the lists that you are included on. Obviously, the more you are listed, there is a good chance that more people find you more useful. So lists are essentially #followfriday on steroids.

If you are a small business owner, hoping to gain some traction on Twitter, lists are godsend for you. They allow you to classify the people you are following under different lists and engage them more effectively. You can create public and private lists of people who may be interesting to your business or those who are talking about your business or niche. You can then decide on the message you want to communicate with each and every list.

Lists will also be very helpful for people who get their research done through the social media. Whether it is finding interesting content to read or researching a specific niche, you can easily do it with lists. Let’s say you want to see what people are talking about as far as laptops are concerned. You can easily create a private list of people who talk about laptops (and provide value in the process). You can then check your list on a daily basis to find out the latest blog posts, news, and developments in that world. You could have done that through Twitter trends and some 3rd party tools. With lists, you can easily get it done.

As you can see, lists are going to be very helpful for startups and small businesses that want to get the most out of Twitter. They are easy to create, free to use, and help you manage information more effectively. There is a lot of information and data to look at on these social media sites, and as a small business owner, you should have better things to do than going through the information for hours. With Twitter lists, you can manage your Twitter information more effectively and get more done in the process.

Paul Dunay has done such a wonderful job with his presentation on this topic, that everyone should take time to go over his recommendations on this subject.

1. CafePress: I have talked about CafePress and how you can make money from it in the past. By using Facebook, you can sell products on Facebook and put more money in your pocket. Here is the app that lets you do just that.

2. AppBank: lets you create your own Facebook app and make money online that way. You can create your own viral app and make money from ads.

3. eBay: a lot of people are making lots of money from eBay. If you happen to be a power-seller and have mastered the art, you can’t afford to not use Facebook to your advantage.

4. Garage Sale: a cool little app for Facebook that lets you create your e-garage sale event online and sell your items to your friends and those who know you.

5. My Merch Store: if you have used Zazzle in the past, you are going to love using My Merch Store to host your own stores on Facebook and start making some money without taking on too much risk.

Whether you are creating your own product and want to market it on Facebook or just want to gain more exposure for your existing business, there is no reason Facebook can’t help you. And the above 5 methods are by no means the only ways you can make money on Facebook. As long as you are creative and can think outside the box, Facebook is your goldmine.