Who would’ve thought that a service like Twitter could help you not only reach more NFL fans, but actually allow you to be interactive and hold conversations with your favorite athletes. Here are 10 “must have” Twitter applications and plugins to add to your twitter tool-kit. Start using any one of these Twitter tools and watch your enjoyment and interaction with NFL players grow!
1. Twitter-Athletes.com – A complete directory of NFL Players (407 Currently), the site organizes the players by team, and even tells you the most popular and active players daily.
The site has the most followed NFL players and our own Kerry Rhodes comes in under number 6 with 354k. Reggie Bush is the most followed with 1.03M!!
2. Twibbon – Ever wonder how people get those small NFL logo’s perfectly placed in the corner of their avatars (Twitter Pictures)? Twibbon is a site that makes this task easy. In fact, you can support any cause in the site OR create your own, but there is a category for Football. Of the 32 sites the Jets are ranked 7th in the NFL.
3. Pro Football Tweeting - A simple interface that pulls in all the NFL players into one stream for easy viewing. You can sign in with your Twitter account to become part of the community.
4. PlayStub – This site integrates users who sign into the site and displays their tweets during the quarter of the game they are following. The site displays key plays similar to GameDay on NFL sites, but then displays the Twitter conversation in each box.
5. Twackle – Dubbed “Your Sports Bar in the Twittersphere”, the site shows realtime NFL tweets in one easy to view stream. It also keeps track of top trends, links and users only related to the NFL.
6. Twazzup – A great search engine that pulls any topic in one stream. It integrates Photos, latest news stories, and searches the twitter-sphere for the most popular twitter accounts and displayers their icons making it easier to follow certain users.
7. TweetGrid – Allows you to monitor any key term or user in your specified grid. For example, you can break down your web browser into 3×2 grids and search multiple terms. I personally will key in on the term Jets, their opponent and super stars names. I will warn you that when something goes down during a game, it is information overload!
8. Topsy – A search engine just for tweets, it searches on key words on tweets, pictures, and stories. It is a great interface and allows you to re-tweet items within the tool.
9. Mr. Tweet - The moment you sign up, Mr. Tweet will send you completely personalized suggestions of great people you might want to know about. For me personally, it recommended all the NFL beat writers, Media people and players. A great tool that takes all the hard work of finding the people you are interested in.
10. Trendistic – Trendistic is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals. I like to put in Jets terms and see how the trends jumped during the games.
Give these Twitter tools a try to help simplify your social networking while searching for interactions with the NFL, getting more exposure with half the effort. Reach more fans, free up more time and reach people who are influential in the sport. Once you start using these Twitter applications, you’ll never know how you got along without them!
