While Twitter has recently made moves to improve its native analytics and targeting options, many third-party tools still give you greater control over your micro-blogging stats.

Here are three free tools that can help you further tweak your tweets.

1. TweetDeck

Twitter-owned TweetDeck is a full service social dashboard that lets you customise your Twitter feed, create custom timelines, schedule tweets, create automated searches for hashtags and more.

It's is a great all-round tool for brands managing multiple Twitter accounts.

2. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a powerful monitoring and management tool that gives you upsized insights about your Twitter followers.

You can segment users via standard variables including bios, relationships and region, but also "social authority" – which determines power users who you should be reaching out to.

3. Topsy

Topsy has been in the Twitter analytics game for close to a decade, and back in 2013 it even indexed every tweet ever sent.

Its advanced search options allow marketers to scour Twitter for specific tweets, mentions, users and even conversations. 

Topsy also has an analytics feature that shows all sorts of useful info including tracking keyword popularity and brand sentiments over time.