I've been speaking a lot about Twitter lately, and I'm unquestionably not alone. Twitter is the internet marketing industry's latest darling. It can be a persuasive lead source and if you can get a sufficient number of retweets for your links engaging the Twitter village can effectively affect your website's search engine rankings! Marketing to the "Twittosphere" is a remarkably helpful idea for those us with service-based businesses. You'll find a lot of prospects, clients, and colleagues using Twitter.

Twitter is not without it's downside, though. The number of tweets you'll be seeing will quickly become overwhelming. You may already be dealing with these challenges. If you're already on Twitter you know that even once you learn how to use hashtags it's not particularly well organized. There's a lot of noise on Twitter and picking through it for tweets and finding references worth engaging can be a surprising amount of work.

To make it easier to operate in this strange new world a handful of applications exist to organize your tweets and make you more efficient.

There are two ways to access Twitter. Most people just log in through the Twitter website. Obviously you should assume this is how most of your followers are viewing your posts. Consider this the main method of accessing the service. The other is through the handful of third-party desktop and mobile clients. Not only do these present a more stylish interface, they often have tools that make your journey more orderly. Let's take a look at a few of these.

TweetDeck

One is TweetDeck, originally from the creators of Seesmic Desktop (an earlier incarnation of the same application). This is a great program. It lets you view and manage more than one account at a time, and organize them into colums.

TweetDeck also allows you to follow trending topics, one of the marketer's best friends. Finally, it has also been expanded to support Facebook and Foursquare. You can even access hash tag searches quickly and easily. The program is free.

Tweetie and Twitterific

If you're looking for a simpler solution there are a lot of choices. Tweetie and Twitterific are the most popular choices. Both can be run without a license, but it's not really freeware. If you don't pay you will have to deal with pop-up ads. These programs bear the standard trademarks of the Twitter client, with easy access to mentions and direct messages.

TwitWipe

There's one thing I really hate about Twitter. Deleting tweets is a royal pain in the bottom. Under normal circumstances, the only way to do this is by logging in and deleting the tweets by hand. It's easy enough to delete a few tweets at a time, but sooner or later you're going to want to delete all your previous tweets. When that time comes you could have thousands of tweets piled up. Deleting that many tweets just isn't practical.

This app can help you. It's a web based utility rather than an installed application. Using this tool you can quickly and easily delete as many tweets as you may need to delete in a single operation. It's easily accessible at twitwipe.com.

Heads Up: TwitWipe erases all the tweets from your account. As far as I know, there isn't any way to pick and choose between your tweets. Another serious problem... The developer is a crass, astoundingly unprofessional fellow and has absolutely no marketing savvy whatsoever. The very first thing you're going to see is the F-Bomb in great, big, boldface letters when you visit the site. He cusses like a sailor all over the site. The product itself, however, works exactly as advertised.

Get Organized and then Get Started

Twitter is a fantastic marketing instrument. Using these utilities you'll notice it's fun and easy to expose your service to scores, even hundreds or thousands, of thrilling new potential clients without being overwhelmed. Twitter currently has somewhere around 75 million users.

Can you honestly afford not to take advantage of it?