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How-To Tuesday: Using TweetDeck to Organize Twitter Contacts

Written on June 2, 2009 by Susan Payton

In realizing that my more tactical, hands-on blog posts get more traffic, I have decided to start How-To Tuesdays. Each Tuesday, I’ll cover specific steps on how to do something that relates to marketing, social media or PR. Feel free to chime in! I’m here to help you, so what can I teach you? Leave me a comment and I’ll do it.

This week I want to talk about TweetDeck, an amazing Twitter tool.

tweetdeck

A lot of newbies to Twitter are overwhelmed with the stream of updates coming at them on their page. They don’t realize there are applications that help make it easier to sort different groups of Tweeple. There are many of these, but the one I really like is TweetDeck.

Why do I like it?

I have over 2,000 people I’m following (don’t worry; you’ll get there), and that is a lot of noise. I need a way to separate people out.

  • Some people I’ve met in person and like to keep up with.
  • Some people I identify as leaders in social media or marketing, and want to know what they’re saying.
  • Some people I don’t really connect with (yet) and are less important to focus on.
  • Sometimes I like to do a search on something like “marketing” to see what people are saying.

TweetDeck lets me separate all these groups out.

Ready to try it? It’s free, so what have you got to lose?

1. Visit http://tweetdeck.com/beta/ and download the free program.

2. Once you have it set up, decide how you want to group people. It might be Business and Personal, or you could do a search for a topic you’re interested in. If you do this, any tweet that contains that word will appear in that column.

bar

The toolbar at the top of your TweetDeck is pretty easy to follow. It lets you:

  • Send a tweet
  • View all friends
  • Reply to someone
  • Send a direct message
  • View favorites
  • Create a group
  • Search for a word or phrase
  • Use TwitScoop to see what words people are talking about the most
  • Share a video with 12seconds.tv
  • Get stock updates with stocktwits
  • Update your Facebook page at the same time as Twitter

I really like the ability to post something to Twitter and Facebook. Before TweetDeck had this function, I used a Facebook application to update my Tweets to Facebook. Problem was, whenever I replied to someone, it would post my half of the conversation, so no one in Facebook knew what I was talking about!

There is also a nice shorten URL field, so you don’t waste your 140 characters with a long URL. You can’t do this on Twitter’s page.

Try it for a week and let me know what you think.

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Posted in Social Media, Marketing & Networking

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No Comments on “How-To Tuesday: Using TweetDeck to Organize Twitter Contacts”

  1. Traci Feit Love | June 2nd, 2009at 1:06 pm

    Thanks so much for posting this guide! I am fairly new to Tweetdeck myself and still getting comfortable with it. One issue I’m having right now is that with two computers (my laptop and desktop), I am trying to keep two separate versions of Tweetdeck consistent – which is hard every time I want to add or remove someone to/from a group. Do you know of any way to use Tweetdeck effectively on two different computers?

  2. Debbie | June 2nd, 2009at 1:46 pm

    I LOVE Tweetdeck! I was so happy to discover it and be able to organize my friends by group or topic and stay up with all of them in a more simplified way!!!

  3. Kelvin Kao | June 2nd, 2009at 2:42 pm

    I love Tweetdeck as well. I only have one group at the time. These are the people that I either know in real life, don’t know in real life but have regular interactions with online, or simply someone I found to be particularly interesting. And then I just scan everybody else’s. As I follow more and more people, I expect to create different groups to keep things more organized.

    And I am surprised that you did not include a link to your Twitter page in this post.

  4. Mary | June 10th, 2009at 2:54 pm

    Very helpful post. I’m loving it. Can you give more info about hooking up Facebook and Twitter – I used to have that working and don’t know why that doesn’t hook anymore. And now I can’t remember how the *&%$ i did it!

    looking forward to your next Tuesday how to!

  5. Susan Payton | June 11th, 2009at 9:24 am

    Traci–
    I don’t. I’d keep it to one and add groups so you don’t get confused.

    Thanks Debbie!

    Kelvin–
    Thanks for calling me out. It’s @eggmarketing and please follow me!

    Mary–
    The easiest way is to use TweetDeck. Then you have the choice with every tweet whether you want to send it to Twitter and/or Facebook.

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