Twitter has quickly become the social networking tool of the century. From major corporations to celebrities, we are just starting to use Twitter to its full potential. How can Twitter best be used for marketing, though?

There are more and more applications being developed every day that attempt to harness the power of Twitter, and to decipher and distill the abundance of content and information. Here are 4 useful tools that have been designed to take advantage and manipulate Twitter’s unlimited capabilities:

1. TweetDeck.com – an amazing all-in-one desktop which holds all of your friends, replies, and direct messages all in one easy to use location. Use it to monitor keywords, followers, etc.

2. TwitScoop.com – an advanced Twitter application that allows you to see real-time friends in conversations as they occur. Use it to view the history of a niche or keyword phrase during various time frames, and measure the trend’s credibility.

3. Monitter.com – While similar to TwitScoop in that it displays real-time conversations containing your keyword or phrase, it also permits users to have multiple windows open displaying several conversations simultaneously.

4. Search.Twitter.com – the Twitter.com search engine. Already nearly as popular as Google, this search engine will help you easily find conversations mentioning specific keywords or terms related to your business or interests, enabling quick and easy targeting of groups or individuals to which to market your products or services.

The proliferation of Twitter applications has made marketing with Twitter one of the easiest and most straightforward ways to increase website traffic. Try it, it works!