I love Twitter, and I find it uniquely suited to help journalists create a community, reach their readers and find out what’s buzzing. Here are some tools I use regularly to help me use Twitter to the best advantage.

This is a short list. There are many, many other Twitter tools. If someone finds one useful that I haven’t mentioned, please share and explain how you use it.

These are my favorite Twitter-related tools:

search.twitter.com: Basically, it’s a tool to search the Twitterverse. I find often it works better than doing a Google search because it gives you results of what’s happening now — not results of recent stories or blog posts.

Here’s how I use it:

• Search by Twitter name. I search by my Twitter name,  bloggingmom67, almost daily to see if people have responded to my tweets (so I can answer back) or retweeted my tweets, so I can thank them. This builds your engagement in Twitter. (You can also search by other people’s names to see what they are tweeting or retweeting.

• Search for a topic. If I’m blogging about the single mom in California who recently had octuplets, I can use the search function to find what other bloggers are saying about her. Google searches tend to turn up news sites first, not blogs. Twitter often turns up blogs, first. As I’ve mentioned before, linking to other blogs in your niche can help build your community of readers and increase the chance other bloggers will link to you — which ups your value in the eyes of Google. I also use this feature to see what topics are getting a buzz.

• Search for city or town where you live or work. This is something I do only occasionally to see what people are saying about my community. It could lead to story/blog post ideas or tips on people to follow.

• Check trending topics: This application gives a list of what topics are popular on Twitter at that very moment, which can be useful. And it includes hashtags that are trending. Hashtags are a pound sign before a word; people use it to aggregate all the tweets on a subject in one page. #cny, for example, aggregates all the tweets about Central New York, where I live, on a page that people can follow. If you’re looking for tweets on a particular hashtag, such as #inaug09, you can plug it into this application and find what people are saying.

Twittergrader.com:  There’s more to this than just a grade.

Here’s how I use it:

• Get your grade: OK, I’m kind of very competitive, so I like knowing my grade.  You plug in your Twitter name and get a grade, based on the number of followers you have, the power of this network, the pace of your updates and the completeness of your profile. It’s intended to measure your power in the Twitterverse.  Best is 100 percent. It’s fun to see your number go up.

• Find followers: The best part of Twitter.grader is it recommends followers to you. If you grade yourself once a month and follow even a quarter of the folks Twitter grader tells you to follow, you’ll increase your power in the Twitterverse rather quickly.

• Find people to follow in your community: Instead of plugging in your Twitter name, use the search function and type in the name of your town/city. You’ll find out your reach in that community, and get some valuable suggestions of local folks to follow.

Retweet Rank: Retweeting is when one person copies what someone else tweets and tweets it again, usually crediting the original tweet. (The format is: RT: @bloggingmom67 means someone is retweeting my tweet.)

Here’s how I use this tool:

• Find people to follow: This tool give a list of the ever-changing  top 10 people whose tweets get retweeted the most. These are good people to follow because they have a lot of credibility in the twitterverse. Plus, if they retweet the blog post link you tweeted, you’re going to get a rush of traffic, because people listen to them. (It has happened to me, and it’s pretty darn amazing.)

• Find own rank: This is more in the category of interesting, not necessary. But it’s good to know your rank if your goal is to increase it. If people regularly retweet your tweeted blog links, you get more bang for your buck on Twitter.

Twitscoop: This application gives you the scoop on what’s hot on Twitter at that very moment. (It’s similar to search.twitter.com, but it pulls up different stuff on occasion, so I find it useful to check both.)

Here’s how I use this tool:

• Check what’s buzzing: You can type in a topic or keyword to see what people are saying about it. Up will pop tweets on the subject, but the coolest part is you’ll get a graph showing how the tweets on the topic are increasing or decreasing over the past six hours. It’s helpful because if you’re blogging on that topic, you want to hit it when it’s hot.

– Gina

(Follow me on Twitter)

Is twitter a magic bullet that will save newspapers? Of course not. The thing is. There is no magic bullet. What the newspaper industry needs to do to adjust to the changes in the media climate are similar to what an overweight person needs to do to get sleek. It’s not one thing: It’s a whole life change, a whole different way of thinking; and it won’t be easy. (But is really anything worth doing easy?)

With that said, I do think twitter can be part of that. It’s a tool that I find, quite frankly, very fun. But it also can be useful to journalists. This post is the first in a series I plan on how journalists can use twitter. It’s based mainly on how I’ve used twitter, as I cover parenting and children at a daily newspaper. (Want to check out what I’m doing, follow me on twitter.)

Part one: How can twitter help a journalist:

1. Networking tool: Journalists need people to tell them stuff, and the way humans are built, they are more likely to tell people they have some type of connection with than those they don’t. To me twitter is a way to connect with sources and readers in your community and on your beat. It’s a bit like chatting it up with the secretaries at the courthouse where you cover courts. You ask how her day was, how her daughter’s wedding went, and you develop a relationship of sorts.  Then when the mayor gets indicted, you might be the person she tips off.  So tweeting about what you had for lunch or that you’re heading to your daughter’s piano lessons are useful because they make the journalist a human being to those who follow him or her.
2. Getting Stealing ideas: The fact is if you’re a blogger — whether a journalist or not — you need to constantly come up with interesting topics to blog about in your niche (or beat, for us journalists.) Twitter is a way to read a bunch of other blogs and Web sites in your area in the same way you’d read a bunch of newspapers to get ideas for stories. I called it “stealing,” but it’s not — it’s getting inspiration. You’re not copying what someone else said; you’re using another’s idea as a starting point for your own blog on that topic. Twitter gives you a way to find out quickly what other blogs and Web sites are writing about. I follow a lot of parenting and mommy and daddy blogs and Web sites on twitter. Regularly, they will tweet about something they have written with a link; I read it; sometimes I blog on the same topic and link back to their site. (That linking back is a great thing to do, which bloggers know but many journalists don’t quite get. I’ll explain that more in a later post.) I have found out about hot topics this way and be able to get my blog into the conversation. MomLogic, a parenting Web site, for example, twittered about a study it did that found that married women hate sex. I read the tweet, reached MomLogic’s post and blogged about it. It became one of my popular posts plus it has the benefit of possibly gaining search-engine traffic because it was a topic that was buzzing around the blogosphere that day. (Again, I’ll explain more about that in a later post.)
3. Finding sources: I was working on a story about how to go back to school on a budget. I was looking for moms who are super frugal. How would I find that? Twitter helped. I had been following a woman for a while who had her own blog, Frugal Upstate. I could tell from reading months of her tweets, that she’d be perfect for the story. So I sent her a direct message on twitter and asked if I could interview her. Of course, I had to check her out like any other source, but twitter helped me find her.
4. Aggregating: Certain topics will really take off on twitter, and there’s something called a hashtag (looks like # and a word that’s related to the topic you are aggregating) that can be used to get all those tweets in one place. Why does this help journalists? There’s millions of people on twitter, but hashtags can help sort through all the voices to the ones you — and your readers — really want to hear. Our newspaper offers a hashtag for all local posts, so they go to one page on our Web site if people add the hashtag (#cny or #syracuse) to their tweets. It’s a quick way to see what others in our community are tweeting about, so it makes the newspaper the place for people to go to see what’s going on. Hashtags are also useful for specific topics. When that happens, it can give journalists a sense of what topics are hot — what’s worth writing about. For example, Motrin ran an advertisement in October about how wearing your infant in an sling causes back pain that you can solve with Motrin. Advocates for babywearing went wild; mommy blogs were spouting off about it; a  hashtag  — #motrinmoms — was set up. A co-worker of mine who is on twitter noticed the hashtag and let me know about it, so I blogged about the issue and was able to add the hashtag to my tweet with a link to my blog. Again, I was able to jump into the conversation and hopefully boost traffic on my blog by being relevant and writing about the “motrin moms” controversy, which was what people in my niche were talking about that day.
5. Breaking news:  The one thing about twitter is it’s quick. You type your “news” in 140 characters or less through a Web page or cell phone text message, and, boom, you’re published. That could provide lots of uses for journalists, I think, especially as more people join twitter. Say you cover courts and you’re at the verdict of a much-followed murder trial. You could soundlessly type “Joe Smoe is guilty” into your phone’s text message system right from the courthouse, and your readers would find out the news before anyone else. Of course you’d follow up with blog posts and a newspaper story. But being first is so much apart of journalism. Now it won’t work for everything. The Rocky Mountain News drew a lot of criticism when it “twittered” a 3-year-old boy’s funeral. That certainly was a mistake, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t applications for twitter. It also was used during the recent Mumbai attacks, and certainly some of the early tweets weren’t accurate because little information was known. But that’s the nature of the medium of twitter: It’s quick and connects you immediately with a story, but journalists still need to use other tools.

Next post: I’ll talk about how journalists can get started on twitter.

– Gina