A Guide To Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a desktop app you can use to basically organise and control your whole Twitter account in one place. You'd think Twitter would actually be the place to do this right? But Tweetdeck has so much more than Twitter in some ways! After mentioning a few times in blog chats that I use Tweetdeck, I've been inundated with questions regarding the different functions it has, and I realised it'd be easier to answer in a full blog post.

Scheduling Whether you choose to schedule tweets or not is totally up to you, I myself find it massively helpful. I work full time and there is no way I would have the time to remind people of my new posts otherwise. Each night, I schedule some tweets for the following day. I'll have a couple every few hours letting people know of the days new post, a couple sharing my bloglovin link, and maybe one or two linking to an older post (or something from the past week or so). If you aren't sure how to schedule tweets for a post that hasn't gone live yet, let me show you quickly. In the screenshot below, you can see this post as it is right now (Sorry I use blogger so this part is only helpful to Blogger users!).

You see that option to the right that says 'Permalink'? It has a link underneath it; this is the link to your post. If you tweet it out to people before you publish it, or before it's scheduled to go out; they still wont be able to see it. But copy this link before you finish editing your post, because you'll need this to schedule tweets. Once I have that link, I use it to schedule my tweets for whenever the post is going live.
For example, this post will go live Tuesday at 8am. So I'm going to schedule a tweet at 8:02am Tuesday with the link, to let people know it's up. I always do it a moment after it is scheduled to go live on the blog, just to be sure I've given it a minute to get posted before I start tweeting it.
Right, so anyway, back to scheduling. In Tweetdeck you can create a tweet with images and links, and schedule as many as you like, as far ahead as you like. Just be sure not to make any two tweets exactly the same, or they won't publish - Twitter doesn't like that.

1. Write out your tweet, including links or any @mentions you'd like included. 2. Choose the exact time you want the tweet to go out. 3. Choose the date you'd like the tweet to go out.
Simple!

Organising Everything If you're like me, you'll love this part of the app more than anything. I love to keep track of certain groups of people, specific hashtags, or just anything I don't want getting lost in my general feed. Tweetdeck allows you to create columns for all of the things you might want 'organised' in their own feed. At the moment, I have 7 columns. Home (my full Twitter feed), Notifications, Scheduled Tweets, Fave people, #lbloggers, #crazybloggers, #bdib.

So you can see it's a nice way of me keeping tabs on everything.
So make a column for specific people, all you have to do is click the plus sign (+) on the far left hand side of Tweetdeck, click 'Lists' and add the user(s) you want to their own handy list. I like to add a load of favourite in their own column, to be sure I'm keeping up with them :) To make a column for specific hashtags, click the plus sign again, click 'Search' and type in the hashtag of your choice. You can also break this down by only viewing tweets with images within this hashtag for example, or only viewing specific users in this hashtag, etc. The list goes on and on! You can really be specific and make this tool work for you. Then simply click 'Add Column' at the bottom, and viola! Your chosen hashtag now has it's own organised column updating constantly for you.
Chats Using the column feature for specific hashtags as mentioned above, is SO HELPFUL when it comes to blog chats. You can move all your columns around, and when a chat is due to start I always make sure I can see my column for the hashtag, my notifications, and a column just for the host themselves. That way I'm using one screen to view the questions, everyone's responses and my own notifications. Perfect! On busier chats, the feed can whiz by so quickly; but I still find I catch more doing this than doing it my old way - before Tweetdeck I used to have like 3/4 different tabs open in my browser and constantly have to refresh them; it was hell.
There is even more I could go into for using Tweetdeck, but even just tackling the basics has made this a pretty long post already! I honestly think everyone should give it a go because I think it's bloody brilliant. I'd never use Buffer or Hootsuite again to be honest. And did I mention you can control multiple Twitter accounts at once with this baby?