One of the things I hear over and over from business owners is that they just don’t have the time to market on social media. Now, I’m all about getting things done the most efficient way possible, and when it comes to social—as I’ve said many times—you absolutely must automate it.
Next up in our series on productivity tools is TweetDeck.com. This handy-dandy tool for automating your social media can be installed right to your desktop, gotten as a Google Chrome App, or accessed by creating an account on their site. This site functions very similarly to Hootsuite, but currently TweetDeck can only post to Twitter and Facebook. It’s a perfect choice for companies who have various different product lines or divisions, with different names and different Twitter accounts promoting them.
The interface, or dashboard, is quite clear and beautiful. If white type on a black background is hard to read, you can change the color scheme to suit your eyes. If you’d like to take a look at their interface and get a sense of what it’s all about, click here.
Since TweetDeck is owned and run by Twitter, you might imagine they’d have a lot of great Twitter related features, and you’d be right! One such is their automatic hashtag button, which will generate the most relevant and popular hashtags for your tweets. This saves you the trouble of thinking of them yourself, obviously, but Tweetdeck has other great innovations as well. You can create groups within your followers, allowing you to tweet out promotions or news to only a certain group that you have selected. Tweetshrink is another great feature, automatically shrinking your overly long tweets.
The TweetDeck interface shows different columns, including your Tweet Stream, your Mentions, Direct Messages, and more. You can also create new columns in your dashboard, for instance a column that filters results by keyword, which allows you to find information on important topics, and find out what people are saying, with great ease. Here’s what they have to say: “Instead of a single timeline, TweetDeck allows you to create columns to display specific content that interests you. You can create a column that shows all your mentions, the results of a search query, a list of favorites, the latest Tweets from a hashtag or Trend… !”
If you are using Twitter to do any sort of research, keep up with leaders in your industry, or find out what your competition is up to, I think you can see the potential of creating customized columns that show you the exact information you need.
Trying to decide between TweetDeck and Hootsuite? Remember, with Hootsuite you can post to more social sites, but TweetDeck has some fantastic and uniquely useful features you might want if you do a fair amount of your social media marketing on Twitter.
I suggest checking them both out, before you decide. They are both free, and easy to set up accounts with. For more info about Tweetdeck’s great features: http://twitter-client-review.toptenreviews.com/tweetdeck-review.html
Warm Regards,
Heather Lutze
Author, Internet Marketing Speaker, Trainer and Consultant
