I’m sure many of you from time-to-time have felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tweets in your timeline. TweetDeck was re-launched last month with some new features and it’s still the ‘go-to’ tool if you’re looking to manage Twitter accounts. This post highlights five ways it will save you time.
1. Create lists
The main reason to use TweetDeck is that you can create lists. Rather than un-following people to reduce the size of your timeline, use lists to select the users you want to follow on a daily basis. Creating a list is easy, give it a name, ‘daily’ for example, and enter the usernames for the people whose tweets you want to see regularly. You can add or remove people from this list after it’s been created.
2. Check in at least twice a day
Set aside times of the day to visit TweetDeck. I suggest checking in at lunchtime and towards the end of the working day. These are times when Twitter traffic is fairly heavy so you’ve got more chance of communicating directly with other users. If you log on twice a day you’ll find you have the luxury of looking again in the evening at your leisure and you won’t have to trawl through a whole day’s activity.
3. Choose only the columns you need
I’m a big believer in less is more, and I’d argue that you only need to create four columns per Twitter account. The first is the List you created, then your complete Timeline, then Interactions and finally Mentions. If you’re happy with the custom list you created then you may decide to drop the Timeline column, leaving you with just three columns, which fits snugly onto the screen of your tablet. Move your columns into the most appropriate sequence by clicking on edit at the top of each column and using the arrows to move them left or right.
4. Start at the end
If you read from the top you’ll be reading through your timeline backwards. This is partly why I suggest allocating set times of the day to check your feed. It’ll quickly become a habit, but also you can scroll through your timeline to the point where you last checked in, to start reading from there. Reading your tweets in chronological order makes more sense and you can ignore the duplicated tweets easier this way too. Clicking on the header of each column will return you to the most recent tweets.
5. Schedule your Tweets
If you decide to check in twice a day, then after reviewing your feed, you can use the rest of the time to schedule the release of your own tweets. Tweeting through TweetDeck allows you to choose the time and date you want your tweet to be released.
Do you agree that TweetDeck is the best time-saving Twitter tool? Are there other ways you find it saves you time?
