We’ve had a lot of conversations with our clients over the past few months who have said ‘I logged onto Twitter, posted once and now I don’t know how to use it properly.’
Well in our experience you can’t ‘tweet’ effectively without an effective tool to help you. There are many out there but our favourite is Tweetdeck and believe me you do need this in order to tweet effectively and not waste your time scanning through lots of tweets that are just not interesting.
Why do people find Twitter difficult to use?
We believe that most people get a bit overwhelmed, immediately you post a tweet you start getting followers and before long your page is filled up with information that quite frankly is not important or relevant to you or your business. Instantly people give up and move on. However if you have an application such as tweetdeck you can very quickly get rid of the ‘spam’ and identify those followers and individuals that you can form a relationship with. Like anything else in business the 80/20 rule applies. You’ll really only be interested in forming relationships with 20% of your audience and Tweetdeck will soon help you identify these people.
Tweetdeck, the application to manage twitter
How does it do that?
Well you can create groups of people and easily identify quickly the users that you want in your 20%. For example you might group your followers in these ways
1) Experts in your field, these people will inspire you and provide information that you can ‘re-tweet’
2) Your prospects, if you know your prospects are ‘tweeting’ what a great way to stay in touch with them throughout the sales cycle
3) Your customers, Enhance your customer service levels, and keep building the most important relationships
4) Local Tweeple, (yes there is a twitter word for everything!) keep in touch with your local community.
The tweets that then just came into one giant ‘inbox’ separate into their relevant groups and instantly you can respond to your top 20% and just scan the rest. Over a period of time you will block certain followers from your main group and promote ones to your priority groups.
What else can TweetDeck do?
- You can post directly onto twitter from it – direct messages, replies, retweets (even if you have multiple accounts – more on that another time)
- You can easily shorten the URL’s you are using
- Follow topics in real time and save prefered searches
- Keep on top of local trends and news
So don’t be overwhelmed, spend a few minutes downloading tweetdeck and sorting your followers into groups of people (start with our suggestions and then add more of your own!) you’ll soon realise that you can’t tweet without this tool!