Recommended social media tool for your business

Social media engagement is important to your business. So is productivity. As any devoted Twitter user or Facebook user will tell you, social media and productivity don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. (Yes, social media engagement can be productive but it can also be distracting and sometimes time consuming). So I decided to write a blog about social media and how you CAN make it productive. (As someone who coaches on social media and productivity, this was a fun post to write. It’s like a root beer float: two great things combined into one!)

Tweetdeck is an application that sits on your desktop (instead of on the web) and gives you access to Twitter… and so much more. Without having to go onto Twitter.com, Tweetdeck offers you the ability to drive your tweets out to Twitter (of course) plus Facebook plus Myspace plus LinkedIn. That’s four-for-the-price-of-one effort! As well, you can see and sort the tweets from people you follow into various categories and columns, allowing you a lot of control over how you process the volume of incoming information.

Incoming messages can be sorted into configurable columns that allow you to pay attention to the people who can help you the most. I have columns for:

• Everyone – because I like to see lots of tweets and pick and choose sometimes.

• Friends and family – because if someone’s having a barbecue, I don’t want the tweetvite to be buried in tweets by other people.

• Vendors and employees – it’s a nice way to get important stuff through the day; and I keep my notification on for this column.

• Clients – this is a great way to pay special attention to the folks who deserve special attention; this is another column where I keep notifications on.

• Thinkers and leaders – these are the tweets that I pay really close attention to because I’m secretly copying down everything they do so I can make my business more successful.

TweetDeck also has an iPhone app so you can tweet on the go.

If I were in charge over there in TweetDeck land, I would make just a couple of modifications to their great program:

1. Columns don’t always work for me. I don’t like that I have to scroll to see a couple of my columns. Why not create panels instead of columns so I can stack 8 on one screen (in 2 rows of 2) instead of only 4? I’m okay if I can only see 3 or 4 tweets at a time. Maybe a drag-to-resize function would work here so I can make some columns longer than others.
2. Scheduled tweets. Sometimes I want to write something now and tweet it later. Scheduling tweets makes life so much easier and helps me to connect even when I can’t be right at my computer. This is huge for lots of people I know.
3. There are a ton of functions that are only accessible when you hover over a user’s picture. How about a few other functions broken out into the tweet itself where it’s faster to use?

These are just my wishlist functions. I’m a big Tweetdeck fan and advise others to use it, too!

Happy Blogging!

Related posts:

1. The Metrics of Social Media
2. Tweets in 10 – All Hands on TweetDeck!
3. What’s Your Social Media Plan?
4. Lessons to Learn from Starbucks and Social Media
5. Tweets in 10 – Let’s Hear You Hoot!