Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

This is post is written for people and businesses who are just getting introduced to Twitter and are looking for a more powerful Twitter app to satisfy their real-time needs!

This is a question we get asked all the time and an important one when defining what tools to use to support your social media strategy.

For me it’s Tweetdeck.

I used to use Twhirl and then Seesmic Desktop for about a year or so but Tweetdeck won me over with it’s ability to let you create groups of people to follow. If I had to pick a few things that make me use Tweetdeck everyday here they are:

1. Multiple account management. I have two accounts, @jorgebarba and @blumaya so I see both of them on Tweetdeck without having to go to each one’s Twitter account. This really comes in handy when monitoring various Twitter accounts if your company has them.

2. Easily filter down to the information you want to see. Tweetdeck also let’s you add columns for individual searches. For example a topic I follow is innovation so I added a column that shows tweets of people who us #innovation hashtag in their tweet. 

So once you’ve determined what topics you’ll be monitoring for your social media strategy, you can plug them into Tweetdeck and voila’ you a real-time dashboard! This makes it really easy to filter through information and makes it a little less overwhelming.

3. All in one Twitter functionality. With Tweetdeck you can easily Reply, ReTweet, DM, favorite, email, translate, follow, unfollow, add to list, view profiles directly from the user interface.

4. Ability to view videos and pictures on Tweetdeck. You can also view YouTube videos, Twitpic photos directly on Tweetdeck without having to browse to YouTube or Twitpic which is a big time saver!

5. Ease of use. Seesmic has most of the functionalities that Tweetdeck does but I consider it to be less easy to use than Tweetdeck.

One caveat about Tweetdeck is that it’s a memory hog, over 100 MB and sometimes goes over 200 MB on a Windows 7 machine. So if you don’t have a fast computer with a lot of memory (at least 4 GB of RAM) I recommend you try Seesmic Web which is a web based version of Seesmic Desktop and a great alternative to Tweetdeck.

So there you go, let me know if you get too overwhelmed