When you rely on social media to interact with your audience and stay on top of your industry, you have to make the process as efficient as possible. Twitter is still a fairly straight forward social media platform – there aren’t so many bells and whistles that it’s impossible to navigate – but for the brand manager or social media marketer who needs to work fast, it takes too much clicking and flipping between screens. Enter TweetDeck, a customizable dashboard where you can view the Twitter info you need and purposely filter out the rest.
Overview of TweetDeck’s Features
TweetDeck is a free, integrated Twitter tool – Twitter didn’t create it, but they did eventually acquire it, which is why it’s now part of the Twitter interface. There used to be a downloadable app for Mac, but while the download page is still up, the download link doesn’t actually work. Use the browser version at tweetdeck.twitter.com.
TweetDeck auto-refreshes and displays Twitter activity in reverse chronological order so that you can keep up with what’s happening in real-time. This is a huge benefit if you don’t like the out-of-sync timeline Twitter usually displays – Twitter works from an algorithm that shows you posts based on what it thinks are your priorities. If you want a straightforward, chronological timeline, a tool like TweetDeck is best.
You can connect multiple Twitter accounts to TweetDeck and then customize columns to suit what you need to see. That can mean Tweets from other accounts (like your best customers or your biggest competitors), Tweets that mention a specific person, Tweets based on a search term, etc. If you need to track something on Twitter, there’s probably a way to do it with TweetDeck. There’s also a handy “Search tips” guide, which you can find in the settings gear on the bottom left.