Here at SMK we love Twitter, but for all its benefits the micro-blogging platform lacks advanced tracking and analytics tools.

Yet there's an entire industry that offers all sorts of third-party Twitter support, from tracking tweets to suggesting who to un-follow.

Here are three of our favourites. 

HootSuite

HootSuite is a free social media dashboard that allows for the easy management of accounts across multiple social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Features include the ability schedule posts in advance, post to more than one social media network simultaneously, as well as some basic analysis and reporting functionality. 

HootSuite Enterprise offers more advanced features and analytics for businesses.

Tweriod

HootSuite might allow you to schedule tweets, but Tweriod tells you the best time to do it. By analysing your tweets and those of your followers, Tweriod calculates the best time of day and week to tweet. 

Once Tweriod completes its analysis it sends you a Direct Message via Twitter with its suggestions. Simply start tweeting and enjoy the enhanced engagement!

Bit.ly

Bit.ly began life as a URL shortening service, but has since evolved into something much more sophisticated.

Besides shrinking links, Bit.ly also allows you to share links with multiple accounts and provides a dashboard where you can see the performances of tweets.

As a sweetener, Bit.ly now allows your to customise your shortened URL to reflect your branding. For example, posts from Mashable.com shrink to mash.to.

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