I am still relatively new to Twitter. I have set up an account for myself and for two mail order companies I have connections with.

These are the tools I deem essential to make the best use of Twitter.

Tweetdeck is an airbased application that you run from your desktop and makes it much easier to track what is happening. You can see your mentions, your direct messages (sadly slightly ruined by spam), and your general twitter feed. You can post quickly and if you write too much it will shorten your tweet and if necessary shorten the url using bit.ly or other options.

Seesmic is another alternative but I don't find it as intuitive as tweetdeck

Hootsuite is an online alternative which I sometimes use. Mainly because I find the search better than tweetdeck. It will allow you to search for several keywords in one search which I find useful.

Socialoomph. I only recently discovered this one and I think it has enormous potential. I have just signed up for their one week professional trial. Unlike most trials you don't have to give a credit card so there are really no strings attached. from their free package to their professional trial which does clever things like find relevant people to follow, follow back people automatically if their user database dont consider them to be spam, feed in tweets from your rss feed, schedule tweets for when you are away from your computer and a number of other tools that I think really make it stand out from the crowd. A lot of these are available under their free package but I am going to sign up for the professional version and will do a full review once I have trialled it.

Twitter Karma: A quick way to see who is following you and who you are following and whether you are following each other. Also gives you the option to unfollow people who aren't following you. This appears to be quite an old one but I haven't found a better alternative.

Twit This: An easy way to send to your twitter account anything you think might be interesting that you find as you browse the web to your followers. Just add to your bookmarks and whenever you find something that you want to tweet just select it from your bookmark and away you go.

Other interesting Twitter tools:

Twittergrader: This does what it says and grades your twitter account. Interesting and always useful to see how someone you are interested in following scores.My score is 94/100 which is pretty good. Not sure how to improve it though!

Twittervalue: Tells you what it thinks your twitter account is worth. Can't imagine anyone wanting to pay for a twitter account although the very valid help_for_heroes is trying to get a million followers and will then auction off its account to support its charity work. Currently its worth $899.. Go figure!

There used to be three major programs that would send you automatic Direct Messages. Recently Socialtoo stoped doing this.

The instructions below will stop you being sent Auto DM's.

From Fun 140:

Go to:http://fun140.com/opt_out

Log in using Twitter OAuth

This will stop you from receiving Auto-DMs.

To stop spammers from finding you using Fun 140 you need to revoke your access to the application. To do this go to your twitter settings page and under the connections click Revoke Access for the Fun140 application.

Social Oomph

#Follow OptMeOut.

Wait for @OptMeOut to follow you back. Once it has done so you will receive a DM from @OptMeOut to tell you it has followed you.

Send a DM to @OptMeOut. (You can write whatever you want in the DM, I just said Thanks!)

Once you have sent the DM, unfollow @OptMeOut. This stops other people from seeing you have opted out and adding you to their spam programs.
Shortly after receiving your DM SocialOomph will send one last DM to confirm that you havce been opted out and you will no longer get automated welcome DMs.

Anybody on Twitter can opt-out and you do not need to be a user of SocialOomph to opt-out.

Hope the above helps some people. Let me know what you think are your crucial twitter tools and feel free to follow me: @janwheeler