This post highlights seven tools to help you use Twitter beyond the expected ways. Some of these are great for expanding the usefulness of Twitter, others may help you become more productive, and some may just add some more fun to your Twitter experience.
Recipe Finding
Are you looking for a recipe that combines bananas, honey and nuts? Twecipe can help. Just follow @twecipe, tweet your ingredients, and you’ll receive a direct message back with a suggested recipe.
Package Tracking
TrackThis lets you track packages being sent by UPS, FedEx, USPS and DHL over Twitter, email, text message or Facebook. You signup for the service, enter a tracking number and a nickname for a package, and TrackThis will continually monitor the package. You will receive a notification each time the package changes location.
Traffic Monitoring
Commuter Feed is a service that lets you see and submit reports on traffic incidents in your local area using Twitter and Pownce. The service works for any city that has an IATA airport code worldwide. You can provide traffic updates by tweeting your city code and update to @commuter. You can stay up to speed by following the traffic feed for your city.
To-Do Reminding
Tweet Reminders helps you keep track of your most important to-dos. You just enter your Twitter username and a maximum of five things that you would like to be reminded about. The service will send you a direct message at the time you specify.
Job Searching
Tweetajob lets recruiters and employers register and create targeted job tweets to job seekers. If you’re looking for a job, you can create a profile, specify your location and areas of interest, and receive relevant job tweets to your Twitter account.
File Sharing
Tweetshare is a feature-rich Twitter app that lets you share your content in order to create discussions. To share files, you first upload your content, including videos, pictures, documents, PDFs. Then you tweet from Tweetshare to send out the link to your files, and your followers provide feedback and contribute to the discussion. It even includes features such as polls to help measure the response to your shared information.
Gift Giving
If you’ve ever wanted to send a gift to a Twitter friend but didn’t have his/her address, Twegistry is for you. You shop for gifts right from the site, then simply send a gift to the recipient’s Twitter account. Twegistry will notify the recipient that they have received a gift and ask if they accept. It’s a new site, so the store is a bit sparse, but it will be interesting to see if the idea takes off.
Do you use Twitter for any of these purposes? Have you found any new uses for Twitter lately?
Alyssa GregoryAlyssa Gregory is a digital and content marketer, small business consultant, and the founder of the Small Business Bonfire — a social, educational and collaborative community for entrepreneurs.
