Feeling a little overwhelmed on Twitter and don’t feel like it’s being maximized as a tool for you? Here are a couple pointers…
If you have multiple twitter accounts to manage, my best suggestion is to use an application to manage your twitter stream. I go back and forth between Seesmic and Hootsuite. I love Seesmic because I can add all of my twitter streams and it blends them into one. So if I’m overlapping followers in these streams, I only see their tweet once. I like Hootsuite for the other reasons. I like that it is an excellent web application. It is also perfect if you have multiple twitter streams, and have a different voice for each stream. This application doesn’t blend these into one stream. As a side note, I use Twitterfon as my iphone application.
If you are having trouble sifting through all your followers, I would also use an application to create custom columns {you can do this in both Hootsuite & Seesmic}. I put my top 20 friends in one stream, a couple custom searches in another. That way I am sure not to miss what my friends are saying, and I’m able to stay atop of the issues that are important to me. Using search.twitter.com is also very helpful if you want to get instant results on what people are tweeting. I use search twitter if I’m meeting with a potential client to see what others are saying. I also use it if I’m researching a topic. It’s been added as a search engine in my book, right next to google.
If you feel like you’re getting sucked into twitter, well, that may be okay, depending on your business. If twitter is a main source of gaining potential clients and raising awareness about your services, you should be on twitter a lot.
How do you manage your twitter usage? What tips would you like to share?
