More than any other social media site, a plethora of programs have sprung up to support Twitter, and they are constantly evolving. Social media professionals and businesses exploring publicity in the online world (and every one should) need to keep up-to-date with the latest Twitter-related developments in order to stay relevant in this unique and popular communications outlet.

Please see below eight advanced Twitter programs you should review.

1. TwitterDesigner

The immediate need for a professional Twitter user involves the design of your Twitter home page. TwitterDesigner goes beyond the simple graphics provided in Twitter itself and lets you add pictures, text and your business logo. For branding purposes, you can match the background of your Twitter columns to the major colors used in your web site.

2. TweetDeck

TweetDeck provides a powerful program to let you monitor your major social media from the same interface. You can create columns for your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, for example. TweetDeck also provides powerful functions to let your shorten your URLs (to meet that 144 character limit) and send your tweets to other sites, such as Facebook, simultaneously.

3. Twitterfeed

Twitterfeed lets you send out entries from other sites through Twitter. By supplying the RSS feed, such as the one from your blog, you can automatically send out the headlines of your blog posts, and the beginning of your entry, too, if you wish, over Twitter.

4. Your Twitter Karma

It’s always a good idea to have more people following you than people you follow. Your Twitter Karma lets you "whack," as it puts it, those rude people whom you follow who don’t have the courtesy to reciprocate.

5. HootSuite

HootSuite provides a sophisticated second-generation Twitter program with all sorts of uses. In addition to sending tweets and integrating with your other social media, as provided by TweetDeck, HootSuite provides sophisticated Twitter analytics and lets you schedule the distribution of your tweets in advance.

6. Klout

Klout represents the Twitter users program of choice to measure your influence, the clout, your tweets carry, beyond obvious benchmarks such as the number of your followers. It is graded on a scale of 1 to 100.

7. TwitSweeper

TwitSweeper helps you remove Twitter followers who send out a lot of spam. It unfollows people who send a lot of automated tweets. You can set the program to either automatically unfollow them or notify you in advance and unfollow them if you fail to reverse the action in a certain time frame.

8. SocialOomph

SocialOomph provides many similar functions to HootSuite and lists many of them on its home page. They include scheduling tweets, tracking keywords, creating extended Twitter profiles, reciprocating to people who follow you and much more.

These represent just a few of the Twitter support programs. Other prominent sites you may wish to review, and beyond the purview of this article include Twitalyzer, TwitPic, TwitterGrader, TweetReach, TweetAttacks, Tweepml and Tmellow.