I've been on Twitter (now X) for as long as I can remember. It’s where I met my co-founder Fabrizio, made great friends and got to know many cool people, projects and tools. At the time, we started Typefully because we wanted a good tool to write, publish and schedule on Twitter and we couldn’t find any good ones. Fast forward a few years and we now have multiple products available to write and schedule content for social media.
I've watched the Twitter ecosystem evolve from a very limited number of tools to a wild west of third-party apps, and now, thanks to high prices on the API access, to a more consolidated market.
Why Twitter apps exist and have a big market
Twitter users have different incentives than Twitter as a platform. Founders want to build their personal brands, creators want to build large audiences and monetize them, and marketers want to get brand awareness. On the other side, Twitter wants to make money from all these people’s attention. The result is that Twitter doesn’t always work on the features these people want.
Enter Twitter apps like Block Party, Typefully, Buffer, and even our own attempt of improving Twitter’s UI with Minimal Theme for X/Twitter.
The native Twitter experience, while continuously improving, has always left power users wanting more. From tools to create content with AI, to better scheduling features, to read-later tools, feed personalization, social listening, etc, these are solutions to real problems Twitter users have and that enhance their experience on the platform.
While Twitter has incorporated some of these features into its native offering (e.g. scheduling), the incentive to keep innovating and doing it fast is just not there. Third-party Twitter apps continue to be the only ones focused on these problems, and the only ones who can solve them fast, leveraging Twitter's API.
The Twitter apps landscape
Today, people (especially indie hackers) have come up with all sorts of tools built on top of Twitter. I personally find it very cool and inspiring to see so many use-cases so I’ll tell you the mains ones using the categories below.
Social Media Management Suites
Here you find the 10+ years old companies that have grown beyond just a simple Twitter app into a full suite of social media tools. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite offer very comprehensive solutions for all sorts of businesses and support all social media platforms you can think of.
They're usually the preferred choice of larger companies or agencies managing multiple brands and accounts.
Content Creation
This is the most common problem Twitter users have that Twitter has not solved. Founders, creators, and marketers all want to grow strong personal brands with consistent and authentic content. However, Twitter is not a content-creation tool. This is where we see Typefully fitting in.
Within this category, you'll find minimal editor for writing with AI assistance, content calendars for planning, collaboration features to work on drafts with your team, powerful scheduling tools, and detailed analytics.
Analytics and Insights
While Twitter offers a pretty good analytics feature, the dashboard is hard to find, lacks some important metrics like profile conversion rate, and the UI is not the greatest.
Some Twitter apps have tried to solve this by offering Twitter analytics as their core value proposition, but I still think the best apps doing this are the ones that also have writing and scheduling as features because they allow you to easily repurpose the content that performs best.
Sales Automation
I won’t go into detail on this one, but these are all those apps that allow you to mass-DM people on Twitter, asking them if they need a landing page. While we support engagement features like auto-DMs, we don’t encourage mass DMing as it likely violates Twitter's terms of service and can result in your account being suspended.
Twitter-Specific
Some apps are exclusively focused on Twitter, only work with Twitter, and offer deep integration and specialized features.
A very famous example is TweetDeck (acquired by Twitter - now it’s Twitter Pro or X Pro), which gives people a simple dashboard to manage multiple Twitter accounts. You can have multiple decks with specific columns about what you want to see, all in the same place.
Another example is the Minimal Theme we built to allow people to hide distracting elements from their Twitter screen, like the Notifications icon and Views counts, making navigating on Twitter less distracting.
How to pick a Twitter App
This comes down to what problem you have with Twitter that you can’t solve without a 3rd party app. Always think about what you want to do, not about flashy features you want to try.
Founders, creators, and marketers should focus on tools that are simple to use and understand. Tools that you know will save you time during your day-to-day and not tools you’ll struggle to get something out of.
- It needs to solve your main problem, whether that’s creating content, scheduling in advance, or getting detailed analytics to report back to your manager.
- It needs to work with all other social platforms you or your company uses (e.g LinkedIn).
- It needs to be easy and user-friendly, with no need for tutorials or extra support.
- It needs to have constant product innovation to keep up with the frequent social media updates.
- It needs to fit your budget, whether as a solo user or as a team of multiple users.
My recommendation is to always check what other people in your niche, friends, or colleagues already use and ask for their opinion on it. It will save you a lot of trouble.
My recommended startup marketing stack
One of the cool things about building Typefully is that the entire team uses it a lot. We use it for Typefully’s Twitter account, I use it for my personal account, and the same goes for Fabrizio, our Head of Marketing/Growth and even our engineers. We collaborate a lot on it re-writing drafts and planning social media posts.
This is what we use when it comes to marketing:
- Social Media: Typefully
- Newsletter: Customer.io
- SEO and Blog: ahrefs and Ghost
- Docs and to-dos: Notion
Conclusion
Twitter (or X) continues to evolve its products and features, but I believe Twitter apps will always have a place as long as they solve real problems for Twitter users.
The market is now more consolidated, with big household names like Buffer staying strong and tools like Typefully growing into great content creation solutions. If you’re a founder, a creator, or a marketer looking to grow your brand online, I’m sure there is an app out there ready to help you. Take a look below to find the best ones.