How To set up Tweetdeck

Good morning, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

Tweetdeck is a great tool to use for your social media, but how do you use it?  Recently I got my brother into Tweetdeck, I thought it was quite self explanatory how to to use it, but he had to call for advice, which made me think – what a good blog post!

Tweetdeck is not just for Twitter, you can use it for your Facebook personal profile, your Facebook Page and your LinkedIn profile.  It is an application that you download onto your desktop (PC or MAC) or onto your iPhone, but it does need the internet to update.  Below is an image of what mine looks like.

Here I have listed 12 ways to use it to make your life easier, simpler and more carefree (well ok, maybe not carefree…)

1. You can add different columns to your deck (click on the + next to the Tweetdeck logo at the top), you choose what you add but in my opinion the must-haves are:
   - All friends you are following
   - Mentions of your twitter name
   - Direct Messages sent to your twitter name
   I also add columns for hashtags of events I am following, for research I am doing and my Facebook newsfeed
2. You can add in all your Twitter, Facebook personal, Facebook Page and LinkedIn accounts (click on the “spanner” at the top right), which means that you  can then send updates from all or any number of accounts at once!
3. Tweetdeck automatically shortens any URLs you put in the “what’s happening” box, so saves you having to go elsewhere to do this.  You can also set it to use a certain program to do this if you want to, just click on the “spanner” in the top right
4. You can add images/video directly into your messages from Tweetdeck you just have to find them on your computer and it does the rest
5. You can schedule your updates, just type in what you want to say and click on the time bomb button (next to send) and choose when you want it to go, then click on send and it will schedule to go at that time
6. There is a cloud button that you can click on in each column to see what is the most popular in that column, the results appear as a word cloud – the larger the word the more popular it is
7. You can easily retweet messages by clicking on the arrow that appears on the person’s Twitter picture that first sent it
8. You an easily reply to mentions that people post about you (ie when your twitter name is in a tweet) again click on the arrow that appears on that person’s Twitter picture
9. You can DM (or direct message) people from Tweetdeck and see the message you sent appear in your direct messages column, either type D Twitter name or click on the envelop that appears when you mouse over their Twitter picture
10. You can have it set up to alert you with an image and/or sound when new messages appear in any of your feeds.  This can be good, but can get annoying depending on how many people you are following
11. You can set it up so that it does an auto complete for Twitter usernames, saves you time, again just click on the spanner
12. Finally you can actually change the colour (just click on the “spanner”) if black is not your thing so that it is more aesthetically pleasing for you

Hopefully for all you none Tweekdeck users you are now going to give this a go and see the results for yourself, my brother has a massive 2 followers on Twitter, but is still finding it useful to have columns for topics he is interested in, rather than having to look them up each time.  Plus it is easy to see when you have been retweeted.

If you give it a go and have any questions let me know in the comments below or on the Social Rabbit Facebook page.