KimberMedia

#TuesdayTips: How To Use TweetDeck

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in #TuesdayTips, Social Media
May 15, 2012

Let met quickly sum up the basis of most advice social media people will give you. Monitor and engage with your audience(s). When you really boil all of this down, that’s what it comes to. Just one problem. There’s a TON of stuff to monitor and engage on. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, blogs, your favorite Star Wars message board…it can REALLY add up. Especially if you are tasked with monitoring several accounts. Facebook is fairly easy to keep track of for multiple pages as they are all stacked there on your own homepage. What about Twitter, though? It moves at speeds that even lightning thinks may be a bit fast, and the sheer amount of information moving is astronomical. So, how do you keep an eye on everything? Your favorite third-party client.

There are MANY of these to choose from, though the “Big Three” in my mind are TweetDeck (which Twitter bought out late last year), Seesmic, and HootSuite. All of these are wonderful services, and I’ve made each my primary tool for at least a month, giving me adequate time to really flesh out which one I like the best. Based on the title of this post, you’ve probably deduced which one I prefer. I could really write a novella on the pros/cons of each of these services, and how they compare to one another. I’ll simply advise you to try each of them out for an extended period of time to allow yourself to pick the right one.

With TweetDeck, you can download the app for Windows, Mac, or Linux. If you use Chrome as your browser (and you should be using Chrome as your browser), you can launch the web app (which works exactly like its desktop counterparts). Once you’ve downloaded the app, you’ll be able to add all of your various accounts (Twitter has said it plans on adding Facebook Pages back into the mix in the future). I prefer to have my personal Twitter stream to the far left in a column, then the @Me feed. This consolidates all of the @ replies you receive from ALL of your accounts into one column. I find this incredibly helpful; though I still make sure I’m paying attention to the @ reply columns of the individual accounts as well.

There are no limits as to the number of accounts or columns you can add. Columns include feeds, replies, direct messages, and searches. So what’s a real world scenario? Let’s say you are Target. You’re job as the Social Media Coordinator for Target is to monitor all mentions of the word “target” on Twitter and engage as necessary. One column is dedicated to #Target, another simply to the word “target”, another to “shopping”, another to “clothes”, etc. You can keep an eye on all of these as they update in real time; and then reply or retweet from that column. It consolidates your work into one easy-to-use and manageable space.

Have you ever used TweetDeck? Thought about it? What concerns do you have about a third-party client? I’ll be in the comments to answer your questions.