Managing Your Twitter Account

Keeping an eye on your Twitter account especially if you become a bit of a Twitter-holic, can be very, very time consuming. Well, fear not I'm going to show you some great tools that'll help you manage Twitter on the go and tweet with speed. Life is crazy, I mean who has time to keep up with all the latest in social networking. I'm Carly Knoblach and if you stick with me I'll show you all the tech tools you need to get socially connected. Do you know that the average lifespan of a tweet is only a couple seconds because it gets buried under an avalanche of new tweets. If you want to see exactly who's mentioned you and check your direct messages it requires a bit of clicking around on Twitter which can take some time. So if you want to see a snap shot of everything that's going on on your Twitter account I recommend HootSuite. In this column is your current news feed which looks pretty much the same as it does on Twitter but you can also setup separate columns to show your mentions and direct messages. HootSuite also makes it really easy to tweet right inside the dashboard and it'll automatically shorten long links giving you a lot more space to write. Just paste them in here and no more wasting precious characters. You can also reply, re-tweet, and send direct messages instantly without having to click back over to Twitter. Another really great feature of HootSuite is the ability to pre-schedule tweets and send them out anytime you want. Now for the average user there's not probably much of a reason to do this but if you're a business owner or blogger you can schedule an entire promotion of tweets ahead of time and then you don't have to be tied to your computer all day. So you might want to write something like this, then schedule it to go out then and later and another one tomorrow, basically choose times when your customers are likely to be online. I just scheduled 10 tweets in 5 minutes, huge time saver. HootSuite also has a fantastic mobile app so you can manage your Twitter account while you're in the slow checkout line of the supermarket. Now if you really want to speed tweet there's nothing better than Timely. Just drag this bookmarklet to your toolbar and whenever the mood strikes you just click on that instead of going to Twitter. Timely's designed so that you can quickly create a tweet about whatever web page you have open so you can easily share a story and add your own thoughts or just delete the text they suggest and type your own. Post it now or send it to the queue to go out later and you don't have to cut and paste the link, Timely shortens it automatically. Now unlike HootSuite you don't get to decide when these tweets go out but Timely has a neat little feature where it determines when the best time is to send the tweet based on who your followers are, because mine are a lot of other moms, it skips the time between when school lets out and when homework is done, now how smart is that. So armed with tools like HootSuite and Timely you are fully equipped to be master of your own domain, I mean your Twitter domain that is. If you want to know more about Twitter check out some of our other tutorials at eHow Tech. Happy tweeting.