Twitter is a great communication platform that can increase your productivity and profits. But what to do about the complexity of its regular interface which is nothing but a deluge of seemingly random messages?

Here are some tools to tame the beast and harness its power for your business:

TweetDeck is at this point probably the best known Twitter tool out there. It allows simultaneous monitoring of your favorite Twitter and Facebook authors. It also allows you to follow all the tweets posted for specific keywords that concern your business or organization. Without such a capability, you can easily lose sight of a tweet commenting on your business. At this writing TweetDeck is still free.

CoTweet allows you to manage up to six Twitter accounts through a single CoTweet login. You can share and assign tweets to your colleagues for follow up. You can search the tweet messages by keywords and trends. You can receive email alerts when a tweet is sent to any of your six Twitter accounts.

Imagine the complexity of keeping track of not only sharing the tweets within your company or organization but also keeping track of who responded to which tweet and when, etc. CoTweet's Conversation Threading tool allows you to accomplish precisely that, eliminating the redundancy of responding to the same tweet multiple times by parties who are not aware of each other's efforts. CoTweet tools will be free until the end of the year. So this is a good time to try them out.

HootSuite allows pacing your tweet posts according to a time schedule and then keep track of the number of times the tweet links are clicked.

If you are keen to find out every comment made about your company on Twitter, you can try The Scout twitter search engine which does precisely that. The Scout is also good for scanning MySpace, Facebook, and blogs up to 5 keywords.

If you care to follow who is retweeting whom, you can try the following web sites: Retweetist.com and Retweetradar.com.

Most of us are used to email or forum environments where conservations are threaded. We can follow who said what to whom, in response to an original question posted. You can accomplish a similar feat with Twitter thanks to Twitoaster. This useful application comes with a bunch of statistical tools with which you can numerically analyze the interactions between different tweeters. The only catch is, the person who is replying a tweet message must do so by hitting the Reply button. Otherwise Twitoaster cannot associate tweets as parts of an ongoing thread.

TweepML accomplishes something that I really like: it creates groups, which are similar to email contact groups. You can benefit your business by creating different tweet groups for your suppliers, customers, prospective customers, investors, etc. Since you can create hierarchical subgroups, you can further divide you customers list, for example, into geographical or linguistic sub-groups, etc. These groups are shared publicly on the web. Thus people can join them or make suggestions as well. Therein lies perhaps the only drawback of TweepML – you cannot create a private group and keep it only to yourself.

TwitterFox is an extension for the Firefox browser. It alerts you when your friends and favorite writers post a tweet.  You can track up to last 40 tweets and also update your own Twitter account from inside TwitterFox.

Twitterhawk is an autoresponder tool that can be useful for a lot of marketers: it monitors your selected keywords and when a tweet is posted using that keyword it automatically sends a prewritten response (up to six) to that Twitter account. If you wish you can also see the messages and approve them before they are sent out. To protect you from getting labeled as a spammer, Twitterhawk will send only one auto message within a two-hour period.

Twitt(url)ly is a must if you'd like to follow the business trends in your field or sector.

Use Twellow (or Whoshouldifollow.com ) to find anyone with a Twitter account, just like you would by using the Yellow Pages. It displays those Twitter account owners who registered in one of the built-in business and technology categories.

To integrate your Microsoft Outlook inbox with Twitter, use TwInbox. You can post tweets and get updates on your friends' tweets directly from inside your Outlook Inbox.

Others worthy of mention:

Use GroupTweet to send Twitter messages to a selected group of people (your employees, clients, etc.) without letting anybody else know about it.

TweetGrid allows you to perform up to 9 key word searches simultaneously and follow what people are tweeting on all those topics. Its difference from TweetDeck is that this is a web application accessible from any browser. You do not need to download anything.

Cligs is just like CoTweet and Hootsuite but goes much deeper.

Tweetie is an iPhone application that works similar to TweetDeck. TwitterBerry is a Blackberry application that works just like Tweetie (and hence,  TweetDeck).

Ugur Akinci is a writer and businessman who develops web properties such as http://www.how-to-write-anything.com