Top 5 Twitter Desktop Applications
Once you start twittering, there’s really no stopping. Before you know it, you’re fighting to keep abreast of all the updates, @ replies, DMs and RTs. It’s a crazy world out there! Luckily for us, there are crazier apps that make our twittering lives easy.
1. TweetDeck
First up is my favourite adobe air application. I’ve used TweetDeck for a couple of months now and I couldn’t be happier! Its best and award winning (well it should be!) feature is the option to sort your twitter users you’re following into groups. TweetDeck lets you group users into separate group that you can follow simultaneously.
Their latest version has a new channel for stocks called ‘Stocktwits’ and another one for Hashtags. It also lets you follow/un-follow, email, translate/un-translate, favourite, add to a group, view profile etc from within the tweet itself.
2. Twhirl
The next best thing to TweetDeck is Twhirl, also an adobe air application. All it’s lacking is the group option – which is where it loses big! Twhirl isn’t only for twitter though.
Twhirl released it latest beta version recently and has been getting rave reviews! While it still doesn’t have the one option that has made TweetDeck such a hit, it’s come up with an excellent search system. The search option in Twhirl is powered by search.twitter.com and opens them up in tabs. Not only that, it gives you the option to ‘activate’ the search after which it will keep updating it (after the initial search) as more tweets are posted regarding the search topic.
You can also record video in the new Twhirl from within the app. What’s more? Their website says they’re working on getting the grouping option up and running! Now if only they had a maximize button…
3. Twitterrific
This one’s for Mac only and comes with a free version as well as a paid one. The free version has most of the same features as the paid one but comes with ads. If you want an ad-free experience, you can buy Twitterrific for $14.95.
Since I don’t use a mac, reviewing the application wouldn’t be fair. Twitip however has a detailed review of it.
Check out the Twitterrific Review.
4. Twitterified
This application holds a lot of surprises. It has a unique interface and offer a few options that other applications do not. The biggest surprise was being able to preview Twitpic pictures in the tweet.
While this application has a lot of options that others don’t, it’s still in it’s beta version which means that it reserves the right to act up at times and naturally has a few bug issues.
Other options include,
- Minimizing tweets.
- Hovering over the picture of a twitter user displays their profile information.
- Clicking on the user picture slides open a tab on the left with more options.
- You can ignore and/or block a user through Twitterified.
- Post links to picture or snap one right there from within the app through your webcam.
- Displays friends and followers in separate tabs.
- Has an option for viewing the public timeline.
- It tracks your @ replies as well as your own tweets in a separate tab.
Did I mention that it gives you a preview of Twitpic pictures linked to within the tweet?
5. TwitterFox
This isn’t exactly a desktop application but a Firefox add on. If you feel applications like TweetDeck and Twhirl distract too much or you’re too busy to open a new program and tweet, TwitterFox is for you.
Update your status from within Firefox (you do use Firefox right?) and read new updates of your friends. You can also retweet, open a tweet in a new tab, mark all as read etc from it. Updates are shown in a pop up balloon at the bottom right of the screen.
It can handle multiple accounts and can be used through keyboard shortcuts as well.
10 Twitter Tools
The sheer amount of tools out there for twitter offering different services is practically insane. From running a poll, to posting pictures, to… I’ll just get on with the list of tools and let you find out for yourself.
1. TwitPic: Where there’s social media, there’s pictures. TwitPic lets you share pictures on twitter. There’s no sign up and no program installation. All you have to do is sign in with your twitter username and password and upload pictures and post them. They’ll send a tweet from your account about the photo. Easy peasy.
2. TwtPoll: Twitter followers are great for polls. If you’re running a poll on your website, running a similar one on twitter can get you more participation and help you gather more data. Using TwtPoll is a breeze. Enter your username, post your question, list your options and click on ‘Create Poll’. It’ll give you options of posting it on twitter, Facebook or your website. Choose the one you want and your followers are ready to poll!
3. TweetLater: If you’re an avid twitter-er or are working on a marketing campaign where you want to tweet regularly through out the day about something then tweetlater is for you. You can schedule tweets through it – so even when you’re sleeping, tweetlater is tweeting your preset tweets for you. Keep in mind not to schedule one promotional tweet an hour to avoid becoming a spammer. Remember, just one.
Tweetlater also lets you track keywords (my favourite), send automated DM’s (my least favourite), and also gives you the option to auto follow your followers among others.
4. Qwitter: The nifty little service catches your twitter quitters. After you sign up for this service (only requires your twitter username and email), qwitter will send you an email every time someone stops following or un-follows you. Not only that, it will also tell after which tweet of yours did the follower quit on you.
It’s a great service and lets you find out which tweets of yours offend people but don’t get obsessive over every single quitter. Of course, if you lose 50 followers over night, then it’s something to look into.
5. TwitterFeed: You’ve RT’d enough tweets and promoted countless links by tweeting about them. It’s only fair that you promote your own blog. Enter twitterfeed. Submit your blog URL in twitterfeed and let it post a tweet for you every time you update your blog. Depending on your posting frequency, you can set up a timer for the service to check if you’ve published your blog. This blog post will be tweeted about 30 minutes after it’s published.
6. TweetVolume: Tweetvolume lets you put in specific words and runs a search to tell how many times the words have been used in twitter stream. The time period is since twitter’s birth. Tweetvolume is a good tool for keyword comparison and a great way to find out how much ‘buzz’ there is about a topic, brand, campaign, person etc.
Check out the comparison I did between freelance, writing, blogging, social media and clients.
7. Tweetag: This tool let you browse the twitterverse according to the most popular topic. Their homepage lists the 40 most frequently discussed topics. So if you want to know what the buzz is about at twitter. You can also search for any topic you want.
A search for ‘Twestival‘ (tell you later what it is) came back with 1518 results out of which 695 tweets had links in them, 164 were questions, 779 were replies and 171 were retweets.
8. BubbleTweet: If you’re a video blogging fan, you’re going to love this one. Bubble tweet lets you add a video message to your twitter profile in the form of a very manageable bubble size. It’s an excellent way to add a voice and a face to your profile and overcome the limitations of the bio line in your profile. There are currently only 651 tweeple using bubble tweet, so if you use it, it’s still going to be unique.
9. TwitterSnooze: If you follow a lot of people, there is bound to be someone who is a little too ‘verbose’. So if their chatter is distracting you or hindering you from following other conversations or tweets, twittersnooze lets you mute their tweets out for a specified period of time.
All you have to do is enter your username, password and the username of the person you want to hit the snooze button on.
However, twittersnooze has a downside to it. Every time you unsnooze a person, it sends them an email alerting them that you’re following them again. Not so feasible if you want to mute people out quietly.
10. Twellow: Want to find people in your industry or area of interest? Twellow lets you search users according to categories. Freelance, blogging, Photoshop, SEO etc are some of the categories of interest to me. Unfortu
nately, searching through category had little success for me, but searching under ‘all people on twellow‘ yielded very interesting results.
To turn up in searches in twellow it would be better to get listed there. A search for my username brought back a tweet from 3 weeks ago and still lists my followers as 155 whereas my followers have grown since then.
It isn’t the best of services, but it has the potential to be a great one. I’d be keeping my eye on this one to see if it better develops.
For a service as simple as twitter, tools like these add all more value to it. These are just 10 of the countless twitter tools/metrics out there.
What twitter tools do you use? How do they add value to your twitter experience?
10 Twitter Tips and Tricks
According to Twitstats, about 32% of twitter users tweet through their browsers. All of us start off by using twitter through a browser. Its only as we follow more and more people and engage in more conversations that we start to feel the need for an application as the browser can no longer keep up with the constant updates.
For those who’re still twittering through a web browser, figuring out shortcuts can make their twittering lives extremely easy. Even though the scale of tweets makes it viable for us to twitter through app’s, there are some things that twitter does best through a browser.
1. @ Replies
The first and most common function of twittering is replying to a tweet. In a browser you have the option of clicking on an arrow to reply to a tweet. Typing @ before the username of the subject does the same. There is no space between @ and the username. Example: “@username This is how your reply would look”.
Note: @username is counted in the 140 characters. The longer the username the lesser number of characters you’ll have to type your message.
2. Direct Message
Popularly known as a DM, direct messages are private messages sent to you or vice versa. They are also 140 characters long and can only be seen by you and the user they’re between. Instead of clicking on the DM option on the left sidebar menu on your twitter homepage and the selecting the username, it’s easier to send a DM directly from the message window.
To send someone a direct message, type d, hit space and then type the username before typing out your message. It would look like: “d @username type your message here”.
3. Re-tweet
If you’ve been on twitter for more than a day, you must have seen tweets starting with ‘RT’. RT stands for retweet and is a way of promoting someone’s tweet. To retweet, type RT followed by @username and then copy paste the tweet you’re retweeting. Once done, it would look like this: “RT @username paste your tweet here.”
4. # Tags
Hash tags took me the most time to figure out. Twitter is pretty basic. You can’t group together users, or turn your followers into groups. One way of separating tweets about a particular topic or by a particular user is by adding # in front of it.
If you’re talking about cricket and/or a certain tournament, adding a # before cricket would form a group. Now every time someone would tag cricket, the tweets would be grouped together. A hash tag for cricket would look like “#cricket”.
To keep track of your hash tags, follow @hashtag. It will automatically follow you back and start tracking your tags. For more information, check out the Twitter Fan Wiki.
5. Twitter Search
Not only does twitter bring you in contact with people outside of your immediate circle, it lets you search it for specific topics too. Twitter Search is a great way to find out who’s talking about the topic of your interest in real time. You can also search for hash tags through twitter search. 6. Following conversations Twitter offers three options regarding the @ replies. No @ replies does not show any @ replies at all. All @ replies: This option shows you all the replies of people you follow. If they’re replying to people you don’t follow, you’ll see those too. All @ replies is the way to go if you want to be effective on twitter. It’ll let you follow different conversations and help you discover new people. It will also make you more visible to the followers of the people you’re conversing with. To enable All @ replies go to Setting –> Notices –> Show me all @ replies. 7. Twitter Backgrounds: Twitter offers the option to change backgrounds to make your profile more interesting. Go to Settings –> Designs. Choose from any of the 12 designs already available on twitter. You can also change your background image to one of your own and customize the colors according to your preference. 8. Twitter With SMS If you’re going to be away from your computer, twitter lets you stay connected by sending tweets via SMS. This option is less feasible as texting rates apply. Also now there are twitter app’s designed for cell phones but when twitter first came out, this option was very popular as it lets you receive tweets on your cell phone too. If you want to enable this option, go to Settings. 9. Twitter Badges If you have a blog or social networking profile (and I really hope you do) then you can publish your tweets on them through twitter badges or widgets. 10. Public Timeline Want to know what the twitterverse is talking about at any given moment? Find out through the public timeline. To be honest, this one seems like a cool idea till you realize that people are tweeting in other languages too. Ones that I don’t understand. If you’re a twittering noob, I hope you found this helpful. My next post “10 Twitter Tools” would be up on February 11th. If you have any questions and would like an answer to them, feel free to contact me.
@ replies to the people I’m following: This is the default setting and only lets you see the tweets between people you follow. For example If A & B are having a conversation, you’ll be able to see it because you follow them both. But if A was talking to C, you wouldn’t see that conversation because you don’t follow C.
(Re)Discovering Twitter
I started Twittering after attending an online writing conference. Everyone there was giving out their twitter id for contact rather than email or website/blog! So I dusted out my old twitter account which I had forgotten I had and started following people. Suddenly, people were recognising me from the conference and I had conversations going on.
Great Writing Exercise
It wasn’t until I got active on twitter that I realised what a great writing exercise twittering is! It can be the perfect case study for concise writing. Having just 140 characters to get your message across in an effective method is not an easy task. Yet, millions of people are doing it every day.
Productivity Booster
If you’re looking for something, tweeting about it can have great results. As a writer, I find I can’t work on one article/blog post etc at a time. When I’m writing, I have at least a couple documents open so that I can jump between them. Working out of MS Word made too much of a clutter from having too many windows open. So I tweeted,
‘I wish there was a text editor that would open up docs in tabs! Working 5 inter related articles and it sucks to have so many windows open.’
In a short while, I had a lot of replies telling me about programs that had the tabs option in them. Most of them were for Mac but someone recommended ‘IBM Lotus Symphony’. I looked it up and it was everything I needed. Working has been so much easier and faster since then!
Promotional Tool
Twitter is a great promotion tool. It also helps us discover the best of the web. When people tweet about blog posts or websites they found interesting or helpful, droves of users click on it driving traffic to the site. Similarly when people publish posts on their own blog, they tweet about that too (it’s only fair) which drives traffic to their post. This results in a lot more feedback in the comments and more readers.
It has also been used to promote products and campaigns. Social Networking is effective. More so, twitter is effective. A big reason for Barack Obama’s successful campaign was social networking. His team knew how to work the Social Media and for a long time (at least till it counted) he was the most followed person on Twitter.
Finding People In Your Geographical Location
I moved to UAE early last year. I had no family here and no friends. Through twitter, I started discovering people who live in Dubai or Sharjah and suddenly I know people! I’m making friends and finding out about events of my interest. Since my bio states ‘Freelance writer in the making’, people from the publishing industry have found their way to me and through them I discovered even more. Of course, it could just be because there are so few twitterers from UAE that we tend to find each other… but it’s good to see social media alive in companies in this part of the world.
Giving Back What You Receive
For any social networking medium to work. It has to be a give and take relationship. You can’t just keep expecting people to answer your call of help if you don’t help them back.
- Make it a point to engage in conversations with people
- Answer questions that are asked
- Re-tweet an article if you like it or simply if someone asks
- Share interesting links often – at least twice more than you do your own
- Tweet about blog posts of your readers
- Make it a point to send direct messages to your followers. Stay away from automated welcome DM’s though.
How has Twitter shaped your online networking? And if you don’t use twitter then why not?
P.S: Leave your twitter id’s in the comments. I’d love to connect with you guys. Mine is @samarowais.
Social Networking The Twitter Way
I rediscovered twitter a few months ago. Unlike most people, I knew there were a lot of benefits of using it – I just couldnt figure out what. I had issues with the whole 140 character thing. How will I fit in my message in 140 characters? Why would I want to update people about what I had for lunch?
In the beginning twittering was exactly that. Telling people when you woke up, when you were heading out and what you had for lunch. In short, twitter was a stalker’s paradise.
As I started following people, some of them prolific bloggers and other social media personalities. I started noticing the different ways they were using it. It was no longer about lunches and loo trips – it was about building a community and helping people out while promoting yourself.
I’ll be doing a 5 part series of articles about twitter here at the base.
- (Re)Discovering Twitter – How I use twitter and you should too.
- 10 Twitter Tricks – Small tricks that make twittering easy and effective.
- 10 Twitter Tools – Tools that enhance your twitter experience and make it effective.
- Top 5 Twitter Apps – Applications that let you use twitter outside your browser.
- 10 Twitter Tools for Fun – Feel good twitter tools just for the fun of it.
Stay tuned!
About Samar
Samar is a freelance writer, blogger and social media enthusiast.
She's the voice behind this blog, the writer behind each post and the one responsible for all the awesomeness (and goof-ups) around here.
If you want to outsource your blogging, get web copy written or have the social media end of things handled then she's your girl!
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