10 great get-down-to-business Twitter apps for nonprofits

CoTweet: Proactive marketing solution

1 CoTweet is a powerhouse for Twitter accounts when you have multiple team members tweeting. It allows for scheduling, tracking and adding notes. Nonprofits can manage up to six Twitter accounts for free using the Standard edition. The ability to track past conversations is a great utility to remind you where you stand with each contact. You can also assign specific people to on-duty status. The Enterprise edition costs about $1,500 per month and is worth it for medium to large organizations. With this edition, you can manage campaigns, assign tasks and integrate the tool with third-party apps such as Salesforce.com. On the other hand, the interface is lacking and the analytics could be better. It also allows for Facebook management.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile

MediaFunnel: The app for team tweeting

2 Media Funnel allows for more of your staff to be involved with the tweeting process. It supports multiple user types — admins, publishers, contributors and guests — and tweets can be placed in a queue for editorial review by a publisher or administrator. Scheduled tweets, brand alerts and tweets via email or SMS are supported. This tool also integrates with Salesforce.com, Zendesk, Twilio and Klout. The free plan allows for two users and no brand monitoring, while the standard plan offers many features and costs $1 per user per month or $1 per social media account, whichever is greater.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Desktop, iPhone, Android, Blackberry

Timely: Make your tweets count

3Timely analyzes your past 199 Twitter updates to determine what times during the day people are most likely to read your posts. You can schedule tweets to go live at those times and can use the bookmarklet to tweet links without leaving your current page. You can tweet right away or add the message to your queue. It’s free.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Klout: Measuring online influence

4 Klout offers a daily summary of your organization’s or team members’ social media influence, with a ranking that factors in your reach and impact on Twitter (metrics such as retweets, follower counts, list memberships, unique mentions), Facebook and LinkedIn. Klout has an open API that’s integrated into many Twitter apps: More than 750 partners use Klout data, including Hootsuite, CoTweet and Attensity 360. For the end user, its analytics platform is rich and easy to use, even if the methodology used in spitting out a Klout Score is a bit opaque.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based, iPhone (Social Score), Android

Twylah: Branded pages for your Twitter account

5Twylah creates one page that sums up your nonprofit brand. This custom page automatically organizes your tweets into topics that you tweet about most often. Users can interact on your page by retweeting and responding to messages. The biggest benefits this tool brings are for SEO. Google no longer indexes tweets, but it does index each Twylah page and the tweets within it, giving your tweets a longer life. It also offers PowerTweets, which creates a separate landing page for your tweets with other recommended messages. It’s good to use this for blog posts, but if you do it too much, you might annoy your followers.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Qwitter: Find out who unfollows you

6Qwitter lets you know when someone stops following you after your last tweet, so you can identify what might have made them unfollow you. This free tool automatically e-mails you when someone unfollows you. If you’re a nonprofit and you tweet about sports and then three people immediately unfollow you, you might want to keep your messages more on topic.
Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web

LiveIntent: Cultivate your following

7With its Discovery Window, LiveIntent lets you turn static social media Follow Us buttons into dynamic windows on your site. The start-up says the intent is to grow your following and fans, while improving SEO and driving additional revenues from “sponsored introductions,” which are based on common interests and level of engagement. The window dynamically adjusts recommendations for each user and each page.

Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Twitpay: Send and receive money via Twitter

8Twitpay is a simple, secure way to enable your supporters to make donations to your cause and to quickly spread the word. It’s free to use use, however, it does charge a percentage of the donations actually paid including a small fee per transaction. They say they have over 45 nonprofit clients including CARE, the National Wildlife Federation and the Children’s Miracle Network.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Optify: Marketing solutions for the real-time web

9Optify is robust business management tool that lets you set up real-time alerts to track specific keywords and provides useful insight into your social media activity. You can create and track Twitter campaigns, and it gives insight into how well visitors from Twitter convert into leads. Optify also offers many other optimization tools to find keywords, improve your website and more. The free edition only allows for one user and tracks five keywords. The basic version costs $99 per month and allows you to track up to 250 keywords. The professional version is $500 per month and allows for 10 users and 2,000 keywords.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

JustCoz: Increasing awareness about your causes

10 An online relay system built for charities and nonprofits, JustCoz gives Twitter users the ability to donate a tweet a day to help raise awareness for causes. Once someone signs up, a tweet will automatically be sent from their account once per day with your customized message. This tool can help raise awareness for a campaign, however, all messages go out at once and you only have the option to send the same message to all of your followers.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web