| Twitter Made Simple: Part 3 |
| Monday, 27 September 2010 16:48 | |||
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The last in our series of Twitter Made Simply articles (for previous parts, see here: www.espprojects.co.uk/tech-news, we look at Tweetdeck, the excellent free Twitter utility from www.tweetdeck.com. Go ahead and download the desktop version now and get it installed! The installation file will also install Adobe Air (also free) automatically. Whilst all of that is going on, let’s talk about what Tweetdeck will do for you. Tweetdeck allows you to post messages to several different social media platforms at once – Facebook and Twitter are but two of the many types of account you can update. Simply add your account credentials (username and password) in the ‘Accounts’ tab of the Settings. To post, you simply click the icon to ‘Compose an Update’ and you are presented with the by-now familiar 140 character submission form. Pressing enter will send the message. Unlike the Twitter website, Tweetdeck will automatically shorten web links (URLs) that you copy and paste into your update. This makes it a great way to publicise interesting webpages whist keeping within the 140 character limit. The best thing about Tweetdeck though, is its ability to show multiple conversations at the same time, each displayed in a different column. You can add as many columns as you like using the ‘Add Column’ icon. Let’s assume you want to look at everything that ‘people you follow’ are saying, and also at the same time look at what anyone in the world says about Social Enterprise and also what people are saying about The Big Society. Tweetdeck will display those searches in separate columns, allowing you to monitor all three conversation streams at once. And if you read Twitter Made Simply Part 2, you will also know that you can follow hashtags too, so in this case your columns could show tweets on #socent and #bsitnorth!!
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