Tweetdeck - the Quintessential Twitter Tool

my Tweetdeck screen

To start this blog, I wanted to begin with what I think is the quintessential Twitter tool, Tweetdeck. If you use no other tool, use this one. If you are going to be stuck on a deserted island and can only bring one Twitter tool, choose Tweetdeck.

This tool gives you a wonderful dashboard that breaks down the components of Twitter. You can have up to 5 columns of information available to you at all times, I usually use 4 unless I am doing something specific with groups (more on that later).

You can have a screen for "All Friends" - that's everyone that you are following. It is a constant flow of what everyone (that you are following) is saying. So if you are following a lot of people, but that can be a lot! But unlike viewing this stream on the web, you don't have to keep refreshing the screen, it does it on its own (although you can force a refresh if it is not fast enough for you!).

Next, you can have your "Replies" column (@replies). This is when someone talks to you or uses your name in a Tweet in public. This allows you to keep track of who is talking about you or with you. Of course, you can also do this from the web, but...not all on one screen. Remember, these are public tweets.

Next is DM's. These are Direct Messages. A message from one Twitter username to another. These are not public. A lot of people "auto-DM" when they get new followers. This an automatic message that goes out, something like "thanks for following me, buy my product". [By the way, I discourage my clients to do these, if you can't tell.] So if you follow a lot of people with these, you may got a DM column that is full of "junk mail." These can be deleted. I just mention it because you may miss authentic DM's if you don't pay attention.

Last on my dashboard is Favorites. These are tweets that I have tagged as a favorite for one reason or the other. I don't think most people use this one, so I will tell you about what most people do use, and that is either Groups or Search.

You can customize a group of people you follow. You can have several groups. If there is a group of industry people you want to watch, you can call it "Twitterati" (or whatever), add the people you want and you will see just their tweets in the Groups column. You can create a group of girlfriends, celebrities, whatever. The group allows you to have a filtered list of a subset of the people you are following.

I sell a social media gadget called Poken. So sometimes I use Search to see if people out there are talking about it. With the Search column, I can enter the word or phrase I am interested and see the results of anyone mentioning this term, and not just people I am following. It's great for companies looking to see who is talking about them.

Before I leave you, I just want to mention a few things about the Tweetdeck header.


From here you can enter your next tweet, shorten a url, upload a photo, open or close columns, as well as decide if you want your tweet to appear as your Facebook status. (I like this control rather than having every tweet show up on Facebook, I think it annoys people, it certainly annoys me!)

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air-based application that runs on PC or Mac (it requires that you install the software first).

And that's pretty much it! It is a global view of everything that is going on in your little Twitter-world!