If you thought LinkedIn was a great invention, then you will love Twitter Groups. All the functionality of the social networking site with the ability to focus on specific topics or interests makes this relatively recent development perfect for networking. After all, connecting with others for business is far easier when everyone is divided into specific areas of interest.

With Twitter, we’re used to responding to one or maybe two people at the most. Unless you DM individuals, all those tweets are public. Now, if you want to communicate with a couple hundred of your friends on Twitter, things get complicated. Unless you have a group set up.

With Twitter groups, you can message everyone in your group with just one tweet. You also have the option of making your group public or keeping it private, thus allowing secure communication between members of the group, something that simply isn’t available with direct messages. Hashtags allow a bit more functionality, but it still is very public.

There are a number of Twitter apps that allow you to build your own social networking group. We went through and tried more than 20 groups. However, here are a few that we liked:

Tweetparty: Allows you to send a single tweet and reach everyone in your group. This is very simple to do once you have set up a group. Just DM the group name and everyone you have added will get the tweet direct messaged to them.

Tweetworks: This application lets you browse groups that already exist and join them. Or you can set up your very own Twitter group. The benefit of this particular site is that you will have all replies staggered below the original query or tweet, making it very easy to keep up with group discussions.

Crowdstatus: If you are in a hurry, this is the application to look at. Rather than cover every discussion by everyone in the group, this site gives you only the latest activity. You will get the basics faster and in a more stylish environment than most of the other applications.

TwitHive: This neat application lets you choose from people, searches or any number of specific tweets and corral them into columns so you can see at a glance what is happening in each area. You can use several accounts here, so if you have multiple Twitter accounts, this is a great option.

TweetDeck: This application allows you to group tweets according to specific people or terms into columns. While it isn’t designed to send tweets to those columns, it does allow you to find things very quickly, even if you have a massive number of Twitter pals.

Twitter is a useful site all on its own, but the various applications that are coming out to enhance it just make this one of the most useful social networking sites around. Which applications have you tried that work well for you?