How TweetDeck Consolidates Your Social Networking
- What TweetDeck IsAnd What It Does
- Connecting to Multiple Social Networks
- Who Uses TweetDeckand Why
- Exploring Different Versions of TweetDeck
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
What TweetDeck Is—And What It Does
If you're reading this book, chances are you're familiar with one or more of the popular social networks. Maybe you're a follower of others on Twitter, maybe you have lots of friends on Facebook or MySpace, or maybe you use LinkedIn for business networking. Or maybe, like many out there, you use more than one of these services.
As a social networker, you know the challenge of keeping up to date on all the posts and updates and tweets that your friends and colleagues make during the course of day. If you subscribe to more than one service, you also face the challenge of coordinating your posts across multiple networks. If you have lots of friends and are yourself a frequent poster, it can be a full-time job keeping everything in sync.
This is where TweetDeck comes in. TweetDeck is a program that manages communications across multiple social networks. With TweetDeck, you can write a single message and have it posted automatically to Twitter, Facebook, and the rest. You also can follow all of your friends' posts and tweets in one place, using a single unified interface.
That's right, TweetDeck consolidates communications from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and more. You don't have to log on to each of these services to stay up to date; TweetDeck serves as a focal point for posting and reading posts from all of these services.
As a nexus for all your social networking, TweetDeck makes it easy to manage all the posts you make and read. Instead of logging on to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn separately, you can read posts from all these services in the TweetDeck application. The program's multicolumn interface helps you organize communications by service or topic so that you can quickly see who's saying what and where. You can search for people or topics across multiple social networks, and save those searches for future use.
TweetDeck also makes it easier to post to your favorite social networks. You can send a single post to multiple services and include photos, videos, and web links in your posts. TweetDeck even lets you make longer posts by linking together multiple tweets.
All this is accomplished via use of multiple columns within the TweetDeck interface. As you can see in Figure 1.1, TweetDeck uses different columns to show different things; each column is customizable. So, for example, you might have one column devoted to showing Twitter tweets, another for Facebook status updates, and a third for LinkedIn network updates. You can even split the people you follow into multiple groups and display each group's posts in a separate column.
)
Figure 1.1 TweetDeck's multiple-column interface.