Twitter is a great way of staying connected with people, as updates can be done very easily and often right from your cell phone. It's an amazing social media device, evolving from merely a way of staying in contact with friends to a valuable media tool for spreading the latest breaking news. With so many people interacting on Twitter, it has become a great place for businesses to get their message out.

Whether you use Twitter to tell people about industry news, new products/services, or your latest blog post, Twitter is a great medium for communicating information about your company to interested followers. Like any other technology, we get out of it what we put in. We choose at what level we'll implement Twitter into our business. It all depends on the tools we use and what we want to do with them. Here are a few helpful tools that can assist in growing and maintaining your business's Twitter account.

1. Just Tweet It is a wonderful tool allowing you to connect with people of similar interests. You add your name, profile and whatever information you'd like about yourself and your interests. The profile is then added to the Just Tweet It directory so millions of people can view it, unless you'd like to limit it only to a select few. It's a good way for like-minded people to connect, and thus enables you to build a targeted group of followers who are interested in the products and services your company offers.

2. Tweet Deck makes viewing all your information on Twitter easier, feeding it into a single application. All the different information provided by countless Twitter add-ons can get pretty bulky. With Tweet Deck, that information can be accessed through a single source that's more convenient to work with.

3. Twhirl is another Twitter feature that filters a variety of Twitter applications and add-ons down to a single feed. This tool can make your businesses Twitter marketing efforts both more efficient and effective.

4. Hoot Suite is a professional Twitter client allowing you to manage multiple twitter accounts in one location. You can manage multiple users and contributors, which makes this a perfect solution for larger businesses. Hoot Suite also makes it easy to track statistics and monitor what people are saying about your brand.

5. TweetMeme is the service behind the ever so popular retweet button that is now common place on many blogs. Adding this button to your business's blog posts will encourage your readers to tweet about your posts and drastically increase your exposure on both Twitter and the TweetMeme social network.

6. Twemes highlights the most talk about and messaged items on Twitter. It's a very useful filter that helps you keep up with the most popular conversations pertaining to your specific industry.

7. TweetBeep is a perfect way of knowing when others are talking about you or your blog. Whenever someone twitters about you or your post, you'll find out about it, which helps you become part of the conversation too.

8. If you're a Twitter junkie and like to keep up with the posts of your followers, TwitKit makes it possible to view multiple Twitter lists at one time. Never miss a post with TwitKit.

9. Twollo makes it easy to find people with similar interests and then follow them. This is a great tool for growing your network and adding targeted individuals who are interested in your business.

10. With Power Twitter, you can easily imbed images from Flickr and videos from Youtube into your posts. It's a great way of sharing media related to your business with all of your followers.