TweetDeck. How tweet it is.

April 29, 2009 / in Information Technology, Social Media / by Jason Terry

Everyone talks about Twitter. I am getting on board. What is it? What do you do with it? There are tons of resources to dig into for answers to these questions. I found that TwiTip by @problogger has a bunch of great advice. (@ denotes a user’s name or handle on Twitter). Here is a link to one of the articles I started with called “13 twitter tips and tutorials for beginners.”

Once you start using Twitter and “Following” people, I highly recommend downloading and installing a free desktop application called TweetDeck. It allows you to organize the information overload that will start coming at you.

My high level thoughts about Twitter after focusing on it for a few hours is that it is simply an amazing resource. You can find relevant information about ANYTHING by doing some simple searches. Say you are a fan of the Blue Man Group like I am. You can do a search on “bluemangroup” and get realtime results of people going to see it, that just saw it, that hate it, links to other online resources about Blue Man Group, etc.

Some of the comments I have seen, that I can agree with, is that you can use Twitter as a replacement for Google searches. The reason I believe this also is that the results are RELEVANT NOW.

In one of my previous blogs, I mentioned Apptix for Hosted Exchange. I tweeted (the process of posting information via Twitter) about Apptix. Here comes the cool part. There is an Apptix user set up on Twitter that represents the company. It AUTOMATICALLY followed me. I got a “Apptix is now following you” notification within minutes of posting my tweet. So think about that. Apptix is able to monitor the ebb and flow of what people are saying about their products and services. To many of you reading this, that is old news. To the newbies opening their eyes for the first time about Twitter (like me) it is AMAZING. The possibilities are staggering.

One final thought… be sure to follow people that you care to hear from. I have already gotten over 100 followers in 1 day of playing around with Twitter. 1 in 20 of the people following me seem to be get rich quick scammers, real estate brokers, or some other person that I am really not interested in following. Just ignore those followers, and if the start direct messaging you… UNFOLLOW THEM. (In other words, break their connection to you in Twitter so they go away)

Good luck playing around with Twitter. Invest just a couple of hours and you will quickly see some amazing things.