Since Twitter has taken the world by storm over the past few years, both for personal and business usage, there is now an abundance of Twitter tools that are available to help you get even more from the service.

With the help of many of these great tools and services you’ll be more productive and efficient and you’ll be able to connect with your followers in any number of new ways.

Here are the 10 most useful Twitter tools to add to your collection:

1. TweetDeck – TweetDeck is the best of the best as far as Twitter tools go. You can install it on your desktop, iPhone or iPad, and what it does is display all of the most recent posts by all of the people you follow. You can also have these sorted by @ replies to you, direct messages, search terms and a variety of other features and functions as well, making your Twitter time far more productive and efficient.

2. Twhirl – Twhirl is a Twitter tool that is continuing to grow more powerful and capable as it intergrates with more services. A desktop client based on Adobe AIR software, this service alerts you to new Tweets, lets you monitor for replies to our account and also lets you search for specific terms, connect to multiple accounts and more. Post and share photos and videos, cross post on multiple platforms, shorten URLs and more.

3. CoTweet – CoTweet is another all-in-one Twitter tool that provides a huge range of different services. It’s perfect for the business with a strong social media presence, because you can manage six accounts at once. You can also tag certain messages or Tweets to be followed up with, you can schedule posts, track and view old conversation history, monitor keywords and trends and more.

4. Tweet Later – renamed Socialoomph, is a great tool for scheduling and planning Tweets so that you can go out of town and not worry about inactivity. Or you can plan all of your Tweets for a week or two and then not have to worry about it all the time, each day. You’ll be able to hook it up with RSS feeds from your blog, monitor for keyword alerts, automatically reply to messages and new followers and much more.

5. TwitterFeed -  is one of the Twitter tools that will help you share your blog and website content automatically with followers, free of charge. You can set it up with an RSS feed or multiple feeds and then have your post directly Tweeted, with a set of controls and specifications that you can adjust to your liking in terms of frequency, text and more.

6. TwitterHawk – this is the perfect tool for a local business looking to gain a quick and effective presence. Instead of trying to reach everyone across the world, this tool will help you quickly narrow down to a local group of people and those who are already talking about a specific message, and reach out to them directly and efficiently.

7. TweetScan – TweetScan is a very simple and easy to work with tool that lets you monitor for a variety of terms, keywords and phrases. Anytime they pop up in a new Tweet, you get an email alert about it, so you always immediately know when somebody mentions your company, website or new product for example.

8. GroupTweet – GroupTweet is a great tool for Twitter, particularly for marketers with a variety of different clients. You can create private groups where Tweets are only distributed to the group members, which is really handy. Additionall, you can create groups and have direct messages shared as Tweets to all in the group, which is great for business discussions and other uses as well.

9. Twittercal – This is a very simple and easy to use Twitter tool that will enable you to hook it up to your Google Calendar. Now you can add events from Twitter to your calendar and display and be reminded of others that are already marked down and saved.

10. Tweetburner – Tweetburner is a great link shortening tool that will also help you track all of the data for your links and clicks. It’s a great way to keep track of all of your links and to see what methods are working the best, what gets the most clicks and where you can improve. The service website also shows you the most popular links that have been sent out recently for anybody.