Twitter continues to be a great way to notify your adoring public, to provide customer service, to connect you with your potential customers, and to keep up to date on your competitors. And while you may not have completely gotten the Twitter ethos, you might be interested in one or more of these third-party tools that I have tried over the past several months. Feel free to share your own favorites. Please note: there is no guarantee that any of these companies will last longer than your average Tweet these days, so the links might be stale by the time you read this.

First are a variety of scheduling tools so you don’t have to be tweeting in the middle of the night or during dinner, as appealing as that might be for some of you. Studies have shown that most tweets aren’t read because they scroll off the feed in a jumble of posts. So it might be better to schedule them for the off-hours when the density is lower. Tweetdeck and Seesmic are two such tools.

Stat, search and research apps. TweetStats will graphically show you when you have Tweeted. Tweetmeme and Wefollow can be used to follow trends and keep track of what is popular at any given point in time. Twittervision can be used to find people in your local geographic area who are active with Twitter. Tools to follow people in a specific industry, or share lists of Twitter users, include Listorious, MuckRack (list of journalists) and Tweepml. Two real time search sites are SocialMention.com, which searches over several dozen sites, and 48ers.com, which will search across Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and Google’s Buzz.

Multiple account posting apps. If you have more than one Twitter account, or want to coordinate Tweets with your Facebook, LinkedIn, and WordPress blog accounts, then take a look at Pixelpipe.com, Ping.fm, or Posterous.com. Each offers ways to send forth your wisdom with a single click. Just make sure you check the post before you distribute widely. Dlvr.it can post your blog and other RSS feeds to nearly a dozen different sites too.