I joined Twitter back in May or June of 2008. I did it because someone I knew told me that it was going to be the next big thing in Web 2.0 and that if nothing else, I should secure my username "jtmartin". I am glad that my friend gave me that heads up. He knew that I was using Web 2.0 to drive traffic and for SEO purposes and that I had published a lot of Squidoo lenses and Hub pages.

The only regret that I have is that I did not pay more attention to my Twitter account until recently. If I was applying the same techniques that I am using now about 10 months ago, I would have a very substantial following right now. But, it's never to late to start and I have been going at it aggressively for a couple weeks now.

I have run across a lot of very usefull tools and so I decided to share my 10 favorite ones with you. These tools will help you automate your Twitter account as well as add all kinds of functionality and give you access to lots of cool and useful statistics.

Here is a list of the ten with a brief description. I recently made a post about Tweet Deck, which is my number 1 pick, and I will go through the whole list and add a more detailed explanation about how to use the various tools.

1. Tweet Deck – a complete control panel that will let you put your tweeting on steriods.
2. Tweet Later – Twitter automation including auto thank you  messages to followers.
3. Twollow – will search Twitter conversations for specified keywords and auto follow participants.
4. Your Twitter Karma – make sure your reciprocating with follows and purge those who don't.
5. Twitter Feed – will pull RSS and data feeds and create Tweets that will post automatically.
6. Twitter Tools – plugin that interfaces your Twitter account with your blog.
7. My Tweet Space – free customized Twitter backgrounds.
8. Twit Pic – share pictures on Twitter
9. Twitter Buttons – free Twitter logos and graphics for your websites
10. Twitter Counter – your "followers" stats along with predictions of how many future followers you will have.

If you found this list useful, please take a moment and submit it to Onlywire and then maybe give it a Digg or Stumble. Please feel free to use your favorite bookmarking service.

If you have any suggestions that you think should be included then leave a comment and I will check them out. Make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed because I will be updating the list.

Note: Tweet Elite Pro is now my official #1

I have been beta testing Tweet Elite Pro since March 26th when I had about 900 followers. I am writing this on June 20th and I now have 16,318 followers. That is with very little effort on my part.

Tweet Elite Pro just recently went up against Hummingbird in a head to head test and Tweet Elite Pro was the victor. Jay Benoit, the creator, worked hand in hand with Twitter through the entire creation process and Twitter has whitelisted the software.

That means that you don't have to worry about getting your account banned because you are using Tweet Elite Pro. Now this doesn't give you free reign to go out and start spamming everyone. It means that you won't get banned for using the auto follow process which built me m huge following.

Tweet Elite Pro does a lot more then follow people. As a matter of fact, if you use the software you don't need most of the programs that are in my list above. If your interested you can find out more at my Tweet Elite Pro blog or you can just go straight to the sales page.