Being on Twitter all day can be a huge time suck. Yet, at over 250 million Tweets posted each day, and over 460,000 people that are signing up daily, one has to find a way to make Twitter work.

So how are the Guy Kawasaki’s and TweetSmarter’s of the world doing it? The answer I have found is to make use of Twitter tools. There exist a lot of them out there and they are the absolute key for me to make Twitter work.

At over 1 million apps and one new one being registered every second, it is very hard to know which one to pick. So here are my top 10 tools to help you transform your Twitter experience into something a lot more efficient and powerful:

#1 TweetStats – Full analytics for all your Tweets

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” said Peter Drucker a long time ago. With TweetStats, you have a powerful tool to measure all your Twitter behavior in one place. It shows you your Tweet timeline to understand how much you are Tweeting each day and each month. It also dives deep into analyzing your best times to Tweet via a Tweet Density report and follower comparisons.

Pro Tip: What I like best is the @reply and Retweet analysis. It gives you a clear picture if you hit the right balance of engagement and content Tweets.

#2 Nurph – The Ultimate Twitter Hashtag Tool

One of my most recent discoveries is Nurph. The App has received a revamp and is now more powerful than ever. It lets you invite friends into a private chat room via a simple Tweet. This is amazing if you want to take a brief connection to a new level and have a longer conversation. A great example for using Nurph is to keep your Twitter community engaged in longer talks. I also had great results using it for support purposes if you want to get feedback on your product or service.

Pro Tip: What I like best is that the App offers featured channels as well as an archive for your chat conversation.

#3 MarketMeSuite – Your powerful Tweeting dashboard

Although there are a ton of Social Media dashboards out there, MarketMeSuite is a great new solution that boasts a ton of additional features. You can connect multiple social networks and the App also supports PeerIndex and Klout support. On top scheduling and pulling in RSS, MarketMeSuite also allows you to white label your Tweets.

Pro Tip: A great feature of MarketMeSuite is to create reply campaigns which allows you to geo-tag and target users a lot more specifically than normal Tweets.

#4 ManageFlitter – Send tweet reminders for important events

Sometimes, finding those updates which are most useful on Twitter are buried somewhere amongst irrelevant Tweets. Whenever this happens, it is time for me to go ahead and sweep out all those Twitter accounts, which don’t add any value for me. With ManageFlitter this is super easy to do. The App displays all accounts which are inactive, don’t follow you back or are spamming your stream and you can unfollow them with just one click.

Pro Tip: What makes ManageFlitter most recommendable is that you don’t have to sign up for anything. You can sign in with Twitter, unfollow the people which don’t add value and off you go.

#5 StrawberryJ.am – Reading Tweets made simple

Seeing through the clutter on Twitter can be very hard sometimes. With StrawberryJ.am, there is no more searching through your stream for finding the good stuff. The app automatically finds the top mentioned Tweets and shows them in a new order beginning with most retweeted update at the start. You can also create lists and search terms that StrawberryJ.am filters for you with their goodness.

Pro Tip: If you really don’t want to sign into another new website each day, try StrawberryJ.am’s handy email feature. They will email you a summary every evening, which is super convenient.

#6 SocialBro – Managing your Twitter community made easy

If you are looking for a tool that tightly focuses on managing your community, look no further than SocialBro. The app lets you manage your lists, see your community in a map and browse your community conveniently based on their engagement. On top of this the app allows you to bucket your followers according to time zones which is very useful to know when to best reach them.

Pro Tip: What I like best here is that SocialBro shows you how fast your followers have been growing over the past and at which times you have lost most followers.

#7 Tweriod – Find your most valuable Tweeting times

This is one of my favorite Apps particularly for its simplicity. All you have to do is sign in with Twitter on the landing page and the App crunches the numbers for you to find your best times to Tweet. It will then show you the results on a beautiful graph and with all your key results in one spot. You can also go ahead and export your results via .pdf very conveniently.

Pro Tip: Tweriod also gives you some great additional analysis showing you different optimal timing for different days of the week. I found this very powerful.

#8 Klout for Chrome – Find top influencers with one glance

Despite some of the recent uproar for Klout’s changes in its algorithm, I believe it is a fantastic way to cut down on time spent looking for the right people on Twitter. With its Chrome extension, you will be see immediately who the best people are you should start engaging with right inside Twitter.com. Since it is often hard to decide which Tweets to pick up and reply to, this is very helpful.

Pro Tip: What I like best is that you can click on each score and get to their Klout profile page to learn more about what they are up to.

#9 Twylah – Beautiful Twitter brand pages

Twylah is an up and coming must have tool for anyone who wants to be serious about Twitter. The App turns all your Tweets into a new, self-branded landing page filtered by the top topics you are Tweeting about. I found this to give a much better overview about what the person is Tweeting about than only looking at ones stream. The rich media display and concise summary of topics turns your Tweets into a great visual experience.

Pro Tip: Twylah also boasts a great feature called Power Tweets. You can send special Tweets, which are surrounded by other relevant content and have proven to decrease bounce rate by over 4x.

#10 WhoTweetedMe – Find out who is Tweeting any article

Always wondered who those people actually are that make the count go up on the Tweet button? With WhoTweetedMe you have a powerful to answer exactly this question. You can drop in any URL and the app will display who Tweeted it, at what times and with what reach. It is a very powerful measure to understand the impact a Tweet can have across the Twitter universe.

Pro Tip: WhoTweetedMe also gives you a list of the top influencers that have retweeted that article. Via the “thank you” button you can thank them right from inside the app.

Making use of these tools has improved my Twitter experience significantly. Staying on top of Twitter, tweeting frequently and at the best times is what has been facilitated tremendously through these Apps for me.

Over to you now. Do you think any of these tools can be of help for your Tweeting effort too?

About the Author: Leo Widrich is the Co-Founder of Buffer. Buffer is a smarter way to publish your Tweets and FB updates that has shown to increase clicks on links by 200%. He also writes a lot more Twitter tips on the Buffer blog.