Tag Archives: learning twitter

Twitter Primer – Using Tweetdeck to Rule the Twitterverse

Twitter is all about the rapid exchange and release of information. If you don’t have a strategy for managing the overflow of tweets you will never catch on to the beauty of Twitter. While Facebook remains the holy grail of social media, Twitter is the heartbeat. News breaks on Twitter. The president tweets his executive ideas, good and bad. Celebrities make their positions and love interests known on Twitter. If you’re looking for the NOW NEWS it’s not on mainstream channels, it’s on Twitter.

But… Twitter is overwhelming for most people. And over 50% of new users drop out within a week of joining the network. Twitter has a UX/UI problem. But they’ve also got a fantastic tool, Tweetdeck, that is now integrated into your Twitter account, that can filter, search, index, and contain the madness that is the tweetstream. (Tweetstream: the 10,000 tweets per second that you can’t possibly manage. Source: Twitter: Bolstering Our Infrastructure)

source: Twitter: Bolstering Our Infrastructure

So, it’s pretty clear that we need help in peering into the tweetstream as well as extracting useful data. And interacting in a logical way, again a challenge, has been solved in a large part by the platform Twitter purchased several years ago, Tweetdeck.

Here’s how Tweetdeck works. Sign into your Twitter account. Then go to this url: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

And here is the default view you will now see of your full Twitter activity.

tweetdeck

And here is what the tweetstream is liable to look like when you first open Tweetdeck on your account.

As you can see, the world of Twitter goes by pretty fast. Here is the basic layout of Tweetdeck when you first load it on your account. Here is the basic outline of what you are seeing.

Each of these columns of information is infinitely configurable. You can filter by all kinds of information to get a real dashboard of your tweets.

But the real power of Tweetdeck comes in when you have multiple Twitter accounts to manage. Here’s what my Tweetdeck Tweet panel looks like when I have all of my Twitter accounts open in Tweetdeck.

From this single screen, I can tweet to any or all of my Twitter accounts at once. I can attach images. I can schedule the tweet for later, or I can DM a specific user to being a conversation. And the real fun begins when you use Tweetdeck to monitor your various Twitter accounts. Here’s the layout I use for my multiple threads.

By using Tweetdeck I can watch over all three of my main accounts. And even further to the right, out of my main view, I can continue to add columns for my other accounts.

If you use Twitter at all, or are thinking of giving it a try, Tweetdeck is a must. And it’s always right there once you’ve logged in. https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

Happy Tweeting.

John McElhenney
@jmacofearth (also seen on Google+: jmacofearth)

A few of the networks you will find me on:

  • linkedin – the professional networking and contacts social site
  • twitter – the firehose of sharing (mostly social media, funny, and odd political)
  • facebook – recently launched uber.la facebook page
  • pinterest – what started as fashion sharing is rapidly becoming the visual delicious
  • my Amazon Author’s Page: John Oakley McElhenney