Before you get lost deep in the wilderness of social media with no breadcrumb trail to lead you out, simplify your Twittering using a very easy tool.

Of all the handy Twitter tools, the best in my opinion Is Social Oomph (www.socialoomph.com; formerly TweetLater). With Social Oomph you can automate your twittering to the degree to which you are comfortable.

It will track all tweets by any keyword you select and deliver a digest of the tweets made using that keyword to your inbox as often as you like. You can set it up to automatically follow the people who made the tweets, or you can check out the people yourself and choose whether or not to follow them. (I prefer to do it manually. While it is a slow way of building your twitter list, it keeps you from adding people who will spam your list. You can tell pretty quickly who the spammers are just by checking out their pages).

You can also use Social Oomph to automatically un-follow people you start to follow that don’t follow you back. Twitter is based on reciprocity, and people do notice whether or not your account is in ratio or out. If you too many people are following you, relative to the number you follow back, that tells people you won’t follow back, which will hold them back from following you. If you follow too many more people than follow you, that seems to imply that your tweets aren’t really a happening thing. An account in good ratio is reassuring to potential Twitter pals.

Auto unfollow, by the way, carries with it the risk of losing your entire list, if the Twitter API goes buggy; but Social Oomph protects against that by only unfollowing ten people at a time.

Social Oomph allows you to line up a batch of tweets and release them into the twittersphere one at a time—handy if you only want to think about it once a week but want to tweet daily, for example.

My other favorite tool is bit.ly, and I’ll tell you about that in my next post.

Linda Ruth can be found on Twitter @Linda_Ruth, and she will follow you back.