How to become a Social Media Power User with TweetDeck

Published on 15 Dec 2011 at 5:46 pm.
Filed under Mobile,Social Media.

You’ve read the articles and accept that social media is the future. You’re on Facebook, and you’re on Twitter and you’re posting away. But it takes up a lot of time. You do occasionally need to shut down, but then you’re missing things. So what do you do? Enter TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is a Web service that allows you to associate multiple social media accounts into a portal that dramatically simplifies managing your social media presence. You can associate multiple Twitter accounts and a single Facebook account with your account. It offers a one stop shop for your social media needs. TweetDeck is such a powerful and useful service that Twitter purchased the company for 40 million dollars.

TweetDeck for the Desktop

The desktop application available for both Mac and Windows allow you to create columns based off of the timelines and lists from your various Twitter accounts. It also allows you to associate a single Facebook account with your TweetDeck account, and will allow you to create columns based off of your Facebook News Feeds and Notification feeds.

The TweetDeck application allows you to create notifications that display in a small window for a few seconds to inform you of any new content. You can optionally set it to display a sound, but if it’s a frequently updating column I would not recommend it. It will drive you crazy. This feature allows you to minimize the main application, but still get a little notification when you are off doing other work. This notification setting allows you to keep up with the latest news. You no longer will miss out on a trending topic.

Another great feature is that one can post status updates for any of your Twitter accounts, your Facebook account, or any of the pages that account can manage. You can also associate a picture with your update as a link, but you cannot just set it to a Facebook account/page update and paste in a URL and have it give you a nice interface that pulls up a thumbnail. You will just have a status update with a link in it. Not a perfect integration, but pretty useful. Also handy is the fact that you can schedule status updates. Know you’re going to be out at a time you need to get a post out there? Just schedule it for later.

TweetDeck’s website functions very similar to the desktop application, but is currently only supported by WebKit based browsers. That means that it only works in Google Chrome and Safari. Support for Firefox and Internet Explorer are coming soon.

TweetDeck for the Mobile

TweetDeck’s mobile support is a bit scattered. They have dedicated apps for iOS and Android, but otherwise they are lacking. They have announced that they are working on creating a browser-based mobile application. At the time of this writing I was not even able to log in to their website from my Android device.

The mobile application for Android is somewhat similar to the desktop application, with a few differences. The desktop features that it seem to be lacking include:

• Re-arrange columns
• A Facebook notification column
• Ability to set a status update for a Facebook page.
• Schedule status updates

That being said, it’s not all negative on the mobile front. Unlike the desktop version the mobile application allows you to integrate your FourSquare account. You can check-in to locations and share comments on the check-in on Foursquare, Facebook, and your Twitter accounts. You can also set up a column that displays recent check-ins and the comments associated with them.

Trying to manage your social media presence can be a very time consuming process. Especially when you have other tasks that you need to take care of. Using TweetDeck you can save time and make yourself a more successful social media marketer.

This post was originally published as How to become a Social Media Power User with TweetDeck for The BrandBuilder Company.