Twitter is an extremely popular social networking site offering many benefits to entrepreneurs. It is an excellent way to expand your network, share news, announce promotions and identify trends. Because its interface is quite rudimentary, Twitter allows individuals to create new tools, or “apps,” to improve functionality. The list of these supplemental Twitter tools is ridiculously long, but here is a quick introduction to seven of the most helpful tools, as chosen by the experts at PMI Education.

1. Twitter Grader: Twitter Grader uses a detailed algorithm to grade your users on a scale of 1-100. This allows you to see how engaged the people are that you’re following and decide if you want to continue to do so.
2. Friend or Follow: This helpful tool tracks your contacts so you can see who your friends, follows and fans are on Twitter. One main benefit is that it helps you see who is following you that you aren’t following and who you are following that isn’t following you.
3. HootSuite: HootSuite is an account manager with an extremely user-friendly interface. It offers a host of functions, such as tweet scheduling, link tracking and account overview. It also allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts at the same time.
4. TweetCube: This free file sharing service allows you to tweet large files to your followers, such as audio, images or video.
5. TwInbox: Microsoft Outlook users will find TwInbox to be incredibly useful, because it allows you to manage your Twitter account directly from your Outlook interface.
6. TweeTake: TweeTake allows you to backup your Twitter account in a safe place. This includes tweets, followers and your own follows.
7. Twitt(url)y: This service tracks what topics people are tweeting and linking to. This is a great way to identify hot trends for blog entries and future tweets.

Update: TweetCube is no longer available