When you dive into the world of Twitter, it starts becoming abundantly obvious some of the shortcomings of the service once you start scaling up the amount of followers you have. How do people with thousands upon thousands of Twitter followers keep on top of their accounts? How do they keep growing their follower count while removing junk accounts or those who don't follow back?

Here are a few free tools we've used at Lone Wolf to help manage and grow our social media presence.

Social Media Management Tools For Real Estate Agents

ManageFlitter

This service is one of the best out there for giving you a great overview of who you follow. Their easy to use interface makes unfollowing accounts a snap. Identify who isn't following you back, or those accounts that are inactive helps clear space for you to follow new accounts.

You'll find that once you get above 2000 followers this becomes important as Twitter imposes caps on the ratio of accounts you can follow at one time. ManageFlitter also has a bunch of Pro level filters, allowing you to see all your followers, as well as identify a whitelist. This is quite handy, as in a lot of cases you'll have accounts you want to follow but they won't follow back--be they celebrity accounts or major brands that don't typically follow back.

Handy Tip: Use the Fast Select feature to quickly select a bunch of followers at one time. Just drag inside this area and you'll be able to bulk select users to unfollow.

Buffer App

Buffer is definitely one of the more popular social helper apps for scheduling tweets. While the whole idea of automating social media can be a bit controversial, the reality is that most agents or brokerages can't devote the resources to monitor their social media presences all day long. While there are companies that can manage to have a devoted community manager position, in a lot of cases when it comes to real estate the task of managing social media presence is only a portion of someone's daily tasks. That's where Buffer App comes in.

Buffer allows you to schedule posts and their release times during the day. Maybe you have a blog post you want to publicize a few times a throughout the day. You can compose a few unique tweets then send them out at different times throughout the day.

You can set multiple release times per day, but unfortunately with the free user level you can't vary the release times per day, as this is a Pro feature.

Handy Tip: Buffer has apps available in Apple's App Store and Google Play store. Scheduling and sharing has never been easier on the go.

If This Then That (IFTTT)

IFTTT is a different and very powerful tool that can be used in all sorts of creative ways outside of social media sharing, but that's what we're going to focus on here. The basic idea is that you can connect two different services, one serving as the trigger and the second serving as a resulting action.

Here's an example of how we use it at Lone Wolf. We have an RSS feed of upcoming events that feed from our blog. When there is a new event, it's added to the RSS feed, which is then fed to IFTTT. This triggers an event that will cause the event to be shared as a tweet to Buffer, which then can share it with Twitter and Facebook from there.

While it sounds complicated, IFTTT has a super easy to understand UI and walks you through the process. The service has loads of pre-built recipes, so you can pick one, fill in a few form fields and be using the service in no time.

Handy Tip: Here's a list of 20 Cool IFTTT recipes to try out. Seeing a few examples can get your brain thinking of how best to put this amazing service to work for you.

Bonus – Fake Follower Check

The last site I'll mention isn't so much a service, but a neat way to check out the quality of your followers. This site will tell you how many bot accounts are actually following your account. Since Twitter is all about engagement, having an account with a mostly fluff won't do you much good if you're trying to grow your business and actually generate leads from social media.

Have your say!

Do you have any indispensable tools you use to manage your Twitter accounts? Let me know in the comments.

To view the original article, visit the Lone Wolf blog.