TweetDeck Review: Easily Manage Social Media

I normally don’t do product reviews, however, with my new found admiration of Press This by WordPress and a conversation I was having on Twitter, I was inspired to share how TweetDeck took me from a Twitter “hater” to a Twitter fan.

Rating: 4.5 stars

Pros:

• Desktop Application: TweetDeck allows you to take advantage of Twitter without being in a web browser
• Manage more than one social networking account, including Facebook, multiple Twitter accounts, LinkedIn from one location
• Customizable, multicolumn view:
• You can quickly respond to followers by staying up-to-date using one column that displays your mentions and another column that displays your direct messages
• Create search columns dedicated to competition, and stay current on what they’re tweeting as well as what others are tweeting about them
• Create a search column dedicated to your business, and quickly learn what your customers (and even employees) are saying about you.\
• Monitor and interact with a number of social networking platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and FourSquare in one location
• Auto-shortening of URLs: Say goodbye to building visitng sites such as bit.ly and the like to generate a shortened URL
• Schedule updates: Since time isn’t always on our side, whether we like to admit it or not, can’t always be on Twitter when we have something to say to our followers. Scheduling tweets is a great solution to this dilemma. Having this feature as part of TweetDeck makes it just that much better.
• Notifications: Be notified of your followers updates with a sound and/or a message that pops up on your screen. (I hate this feature because it’s annoying as heck to me, but some people appreciate it so I’m listing it as a pro. The good thing is that you can customize this feature of totally turn it off.)
• Additional features that make your Twitter life easier:
• Easily retweet with or without comments
• Easily post pictures from within the application
• Post over 140 character by using the “long update” feature
• When you include the “@” you’ll be prompted with a list of your followers
• When you include the “#” (also known as a hash mark), TweetDeck  offer suggested hash mark statements based on hash mark history

Cons:

• Be careful when managing more than one Twitter account: TweetDeck will automatically default to one Twitter account, and there are times you may find yourself posting to one account when you really wanted to post to another. (Yes…I can say
  
• Can’t manage or monitor you business’ Facebook page: I’m still searching for a solution that I like as it relates to posting to my Facebook page. (BTW…Hootsuite doesn’t do it for me because it doesn’t compare to TweetDeck’s simplicity)
• Facebook update overload: If you have lots of Facebook friends,  you will be overloaded with the amount of updates that come through your news feed. (Easily avoid this by not displaying a Facebook News Feed column.)

I’ll admit. I primarily use TweetDeck for it’s Twitter features and don’t use the mobile app as I have fallen in love with Twidroyd, a mobile app that allows you to post both Facebook and Twitter from your Android phone. However, I have been using TweetDeck for over a year and am pretty pleased with its offerings. #justsayin (pun intended)

Learn more about Tweet Deck

A little more light reading, eh?

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Live, love, prosper,

Regina R. Patterson, M.B.A.

Marketing & Web Content Consultant