Getting The Most Out Of Twitter

"Wear your Twitter badge with pride" courtesy of jmilles

If you’re only using the Twitter website, you’re not really using twitter – something I overheard at BlogWorld that keeps rolling around in my head along with the theme to “Family Ties”. The point is that even with their new “Lists” feature (I’ll talk about that another time), you’re losing out on squeezing everything you can out of Twitter if you limit yourself to the site. There are a bunch of Desktop applications – I prefer Tweetdeck – that let you manage your contacts (yay for groups), make ReTweeting a simple click of a button (no cutting and pasting) and their multiple columns let me run searches, monitor mentions of my name and even integrates with Facebook to allow me to keep up with friends and engage them without leaving my desktop (makes me feel like an evil genius with a centrally located lair). I would highly recommend it, and if I had an iPhone (get on the ball, Verizon) the tweeteck app is the first one I would try. Right now my Blackberry Curve 8830 looks like an old bag phone compared to what’s out there.

Seesmic Desktop is another popular desktop application that integrates Facebook, is supposedly using Twitter’s lists function (although not on the version I have). I’m not a huge fan because the Tweetdeck layout is bit more intuitive to me, but you should check them out and decide for yourself.

One last tool I’ll mention here is HootSuite, a web-based app that takes a more business oriented tack, allowing you to have multiple users manage an account, track statistic when you send out a link, and focus on brand monitoring – and it’s free! I’d be interested to see what kind of desktop app they would create – I can’t imagine it’s that far off for them.

So many people give up on twitter and get frustrated and confused by twitter because the web interface SUCKS. If you’re following more than 50 people and a percentage of those 50 tweet all the time you’re going to have a really tough time keeping up with them – if that was all I knew, I probably wouldn’t have stuck with twitter. Before you give it up, though, just look around at all the different ways you can sift through the stream, keep up with people and stay on top of it, you’ll see how amazing Twitter can actually be.

What are you using for Twitter? Spill it.

Tags: Desktop Applications, Microblogging, Seesmic, Social Media, Tweetdeck, Twitter