In our previous post, How to Use Twitter, we talked about some of the basics when it comes to setting up and using your Twitter account. By the way, we go into much more detail about using Twitter and our Infinite Pipeline Relationship Development process in our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for B2B Sales Success – Sales Person Edition. See the bottom of this post for more info.
In this post, we continue the Twitter series, and look at some of the available tools for managing your Twitter accounts.
Managing Your Accounts
Once you have an account, you can use it directly from the Website or via a variety of desktop tools, including:
These applications allow you to more easily filter and sort your Twitter stream. And after you’ve started following more than a dozen tweeps, you’re going to need one of these apps to keep things straight. You can create sections in each of these tools that enable you to follow one or more people specifically, monitor a recurring Twitter search, and they also enable you to post, reply, and retweet using your own Twitter account.
Bought for $40 million in mid-2011 by Twitter itself, Tweetdeck dominates the desktop Twitter/social networking market with Hootsuite (which acquired Seesmic Ping in September 2012 and appears to be targeting mobile phones with the app) close behind. All three are fighting for visibility on iPhone and Android phones.
Each of the tools we mentioned allows you to set up columns representing a particular social media feed — your Twitter stream, Facebook stream, and perhaps a Twitter list as well as monitoring a particular keyword search. HootSuite’s approach is a bit different, running in a Web browser, or integrating into the Firefox browser as a clickable widget, enabling you to monitor your Twitter feed wherever you are. Currently, HootSuite is winning the arms race, supporting the largest number of social networks.
TweetDeck is nice, but its little chirp sound effect when a new post comes in drives us crazy. Each of these platforms have their good points, and we use all of them at different times for different reasons.
Next up: How to Get Twitter Followers
Managing Your Twitter Accounts is the 104th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 294. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2
Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV
What Others Are Saying
“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies
“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)
“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances
