CoTweet.com is a powerful Twitter-centric web application designed to help brands connect with their audience and join the conversation. Although used by some large companies such as Ford, Pepsi and Whole Foods I’ve seen little mention of the tool in the blogosphere and thought it deserved some attention.

Why use CoTweet.com?

• Integrated monitoring and response. By going to cotweet.com/search (after signing up) you can monitor any keyword you wish in a column-based interface. What’s particularly brilliant though is that you can quickly reply to tweets and are given plenty of options including an integrated URL shortener and the ability to schedule your responses.
• Fast and sleek interface. The problem I’ve found with most desktop applications like TweetDeck is they run fairly slow and consume large amounts of resources (mainly at the fault of Adobe Air I believe). CoTweet on the other hand is surprisingly fast and has a sleek Mac-like interface. It looks good but is not overpowering either; a good balance between aesthetics and usability.
• Support for multiple accounts. Many bloggers have multiple Twitter accounts to either differentiate between business and personal or for different projects. CoTweet handles multiple accounts beautifully making it easy for solopreneurs to connect with a range of markets and larger companies to widen their Twitter presence.
• Suitable for teams. For some this’ll be the killer feature. To my knowledge CoTweet is the only Twitter tool that allows multiple users to have access to the same account and assign different tweets to those users. Very useful if you’re a larger company with multiple staff managing the Twitter account, or if you’re running your business as a partnership.
• Gives you all the information you need. Simply click on the username of a Twitterer and a sidebar slides out with every detail about that user, a button to quickly follow that user and also access to past conversations you’ve had with them.

How to use CoTweet.com Effectively

1. Understand search filters. Twitter has quite powerful search filters that most people don’t make use of. Since CoTweet uses Twitter’s API, these same filters apply. A previous guest post on TwiTip covers 7 ways to use Twitter search, so that’s a good starting point. The simplest way to make use of search filters when using CoTweet is to add the line “-from:YOURUSERNAME -RT” (without the quotes) whenever you want to track a certain phrase. This hides your own tweets from and stops re-tweeted content from showing up to prevent duplication.
2. Monitor beyond your brand. Monitoring your own brand is certainly important but will unlikely give your exposure beyond your current boundaries. Consider monitoring:
   • Hash tags. Jump into the conversation beyond specific mentions of products.
   • Names (and Twitter usernames) of industry figures. One thing I do is monitor tweets that mention @tferriss because I know people interested in Tim might be interested in my site, and this gives me a chance to connect with them.
   • Other brands. See how the conversation is flowing around your competitors. If you start seeing trends (like, dislikes etc) you can work them into your overall strategy. Twitter’s search is essentially free market research.
3. Embrace every connection. No connection is worth more or less than any other connection. Reply to and connect with as many people as humanly possible. This may not be effective time-wise, but surprisingly strong bonds can be built in less than 140 characters.
4. Track results with bit.ly. By going to the Integrations tab under Settings you can connect your bit.ly accont to CoTweet. Whenever you use CoTweet to tweet a link you’ll be able to track the number of clicks it gets via the bit.ly interface. This is great for gauging interest in content you share so you can accurately tailor your tweets to your audience.
5. Read the official documentation. There’s plenty of features built in to CoTweet and for some it may be a tad overwhelming (especially those working at larger companies who have a bad case of inertia). Luckily they realised that and there’s plenty of detailed documentation.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



How To Use CoTweet To Join The Conversation

Who says you can only have one Twitter account? You have (at least) two emails, don’t you? One for work and one for your personal stuff? Or phone numbers – one for the office and one for you cell? Why not have two Twitter ID’s?

As Twitter continues to grow, more and more people will find a need for multiple handles.  Usually, it’s a case where your mom doesn’t care about what’s going on in the tech world. She does want to see the photos of your kids on Flickr, though!

Desktop Applications Don’t Cut It

Multiple Twitter accounts poses a problem, doesn’t it? Most of the desktop Twitter applications allow just one profile. You could log in and out of your various profiles all day – but who wants to do that? Splitweet has the answer.

Splitweet is a Twitter multi account manager that lets you do all the normal stuff like monitor your Twitter feeds, send replies and send direct messages. The difference is you can do it for multiple accounts!

Color Coded, Multi Twitter Feed Awesomeness

Once you set up your account, all you need to do is add your Twitter credentials in the ‘Twitter accounts’ tab. Then, just write your tweet and check the accounts you want the message to go to.  Hit ‘Tweet it’ and the update is off!

Monitoring your feeds is just as easy. Splitweet color codes the accounts. In my profile, @jasondrohn is green while @axiium is blue. Every time a new tweet comes in, the color comes up to identify where it’s from.

Behind Curtain #3 – Brand Monitoring!

As an added bonus, Splitweet offers brand monitoring. Just specify the keyword that you want tracked, such as ‘Twitip,’ and you’ll be notified every time the word is mentioned on Twitter. I’ve used it to monitor some client projects and my own blogs and it works really well.

Brand monitoring is great for the business user as well. Just add your services or your products to Splitweet and let it keep track of what people think of them!

Yes, There Are A Couple Downsides…

The downside to Splitweet – it’s only available online. There isn’t a desktop app available yet. If you’re anything like me, this can be a pain. I am a Firefox tab fiend, usually averaging about 14 open tabs. One tends to get lost pretty quickly!

Additionally, a browser window is slow to update  Splitweet uses AJAX and it uses it pretty well.  I’m just used to having tabs like TweetDeck or Twhirl guide me though Twitter conversations.  Nothing major – just a personal preference.

Ultimately, It’s A Great Tool

Splitweet is great for people managing multiple accounts as long as they don’t mind interacting through a browser window. Conversations are pretty fluid and Tweets are well marked. I am personally addicted to desktop apps, though.

I fully expect a few of those applications to adopt the multi-Twitter account functionality soon enough. I do hope Splitweet gets something into beta before long, though.

Do you have two (or more) accounts?  How do you manage them currently?

[image by Kaitlyn698]

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts Is Easier Than You Think

Back on November 10th, Darren did a reader poll where he asked, Do You Log Into Twitter.com To Tweet? So far, I sometimes use twitter.com and sometimes a client is in the lead with 430 votes. However, I always login to twitter.com is in second place with 247 votes. This review of Twhirl should provide insight into what those who are not using this client are missing.

Start From The Beginning:

Thanks to the API and the tremendous amount of third party support for Twitter, end users have a ton of options to choose from when it comes to accessing Twitter from something other than the Twitter.com website. There are FireFox extensions such as Tweetbar and TwitKit, sending tweets via cell phone etc. However, the focus of this review will be centered on Twhirl which is a desktop application built on top of Adobe AIR. In order to install and use Twhirl, you’ll need to first download and install the Adobe AIR framework.. Adobe Air is available for Windows 2000; Windows XP; Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise; and Mac OS X v10.4 or 10.5. The Linux release of Adobe AIR is under development.

Post Installation:

After Twhirl is installed, it will open up a dialog screen asking for your Twitter username and password. (Whether or not to trust third parties with your account username and password is fodder for another post but in my experience, Twhirl has not done anything unacceptable with my credentials.) The first thing you should do is provide Twhirl with a Twitter username. Once the username is added, select it and click on the Connect button. This should bring up the password box. After providing Twhirl your password, you should end up being logged into your Twitter.com user account. The next step is to configure Twhirl.

*Note* It’s important to note that Twhirl accepts multiple user accounts. You can even log into them at the same time. Twhirl will end up providing you a seperate status window for each account that you log into. I’d prefer a set of tabs that I can control from one main window but that isn’t supported at this time.

Configuration:

The configuration of Twhirl is separated by four distinct areas. General, Visual, Notify, and Network.

General: From this panel you can configure Twhirl to open the logged in account when the application starts, decide if Twhirl is always on top and to hide the window when minimized. This is where you can also decide if profiles are looked up through the application or in the browser by default.

Retweeting has become a popular way to rebroadcast information from one tweeter to another. However, the text that is part of the retweet count towards your 140 characters so it’s important to keep your retweet text as short as possible. For example, the default retweet configuration is Retweeting %s: %t. A better configuration I have seen people use is, RT %s: %t. The latter saves you 8 characters. This can be the difference between getting your message published or not.

Another strong point of Twhirl includes supporting the ability to post status updates to both Pownce and Jaiku. However, reading messages from these services is not yet implemented. Identi.ca is supported whereas in a future version, laconi.ca will also be supported.

Visual: As one could guess, the visual configuration deals with how the application looks and feels. This is where you can configure whether or not the tweet input is shown at the top, auto-hide the tweet input area, prefix tweets with sender’s name, and mark received tweets as new. The opacity configuration deals with how see-through the application window is when it is inactive. For instance, you can leave the Twhirl window open on your desktop with a low opacity value allowing the application to be less of a distraction. Only when the mouse cursor hovers over the window will the opacity reach 100%. The last option enables you to configure the font and size of the tweets. I’ve discovered that the Arial font is just fine but I prefer the size to be 12 versus 11.

Notify: This aspect of the configuration is all about messages received and messages sent. The first option, no notifications for old messages on start deals with whether or not you’ll see windows of old messages when you start the application. Disable this setting and restart Twhirl to get an idea of what I mean. The next option pertains to playing sounds and gives you a slider in which to control the sound volume. Sounds within Twhirl are heard after you receive the latest round of Tweets, Direct Messages, etc. Think of it as an audio queue. Personally, I have sounds turned off because Twitter by itself is distracting enough to the point that I don’t need to be continuously reminded to stickt my head in the stream.

The next option set is really cool and I recommend leaving it enabled. Notification windows are an excellent way to see the latest round of tweets or to view direct messages without having to see them within the application. For instance, I can have Twhirl minimized to the task bar but thanks to the notification windows, I can be kept updated without looking at the actual time line. I suggest fine tuning this option as it serves as yet another distraction. In my own use case, I configured Twhirl to only show me notification windows for direct messages or replies as those are the most important messages that I don’t want to miss. The last option provides a means of configuring how long the notification windows should be displayed. If you have quick eyes, you won’t need to edit this but in all other use cases, 4-6 seconds seems to be a good amount time.

Network: The network portion of configuring Twhirl is probably the most important aspect since it describes how the application behaves with the Twitter API. As it stands, the API limit for requests per hour is 100. Twhirl only allows a maximum of 80/req per hour, even if the box for following the reduced API limits is unchecked. The three sliders at the bottom determine the amount of time a request is made for a particular kind of tweet. If you are a heavy Direct Messenger, move that slider farther to the right. If you are more into replies, move that particular slider over to the right. With the way I use Twitter, I configure Tweets and Replies to update every two minutes while direct messages update every three minutes. While not real-time, this is close enough for me.

One thing to keep in mind is that the API limit is per account, not per client.

Almost Done:

Now that you have the application configured, it’s time to make it look better. With Twhirl opened, click on the logo in the top left hand corner. This will open up the account manager. Click on the colors tab. This will allow you to choose between 14 different color schemes. Personally, I enjoy the Into The Dark theme. While the official Twhirl website does not provide an area to download user generated color schemes, making your own is as easy as editing the XML files of the default scheme. I’ll explain how to do this in a future post.

Once you’re styling and profiling, you can either choose to change the language of the software from English to German, Italian or Spanish. Or, you can click on the Update tab that tells you which version of the client you’re using, a way to check for updates and a link to view the changelog. After you work your way through those tabs, you’re all set to start tweeting away at the luxury of your desktop.

Conclusion:

There are many choices for you to choose from when it comes to accessing Twitter from the outside. Twhirl just happens to be my favorite. This application serves as an excellent example as to what is possible using the Adobe Air Framework as a base for desktop applications. Considering Twhirl was acquired by Seesmic, INC. back in April of 2008, I see nothing but great things for this simple yet extremely effective application.

This Review of Twhirl was written by Jeff Chandler (@jeffr0) who is currently a writer for Performancing, BloggerTalks and is the host of two podcasts, WordPress Weekly and Perfcast.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Twhirl [Review]

Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air desktop application used to access Twitter. Tweetdeck is available for the Windows and MAC operating systems. It is made of panes that allow you to take the enormous amount of information contained within Twitter and break it down into parts that are more easily managed.

Default Panes:

• All Tweets – All the people that you are following.
• Replies – All @ messages sent to your username
• Direct Messages – All personal d messages sent to your username

More panes can be added by using Tweetdeck’s features, such as Groups, and can be rearranged by moving them to the left or the right.

Integrated Features:

Search – The search used by Tweetdeck is http://search.twitter.com Followers or all twitter users can be searched and the results open up in a new pane. I frequently run a search on WordPress to discover new resources, help individuals who are having problems, and locate work.

Twitscoop – Twitscoop reports the hot trends on Twitter in a tag cloud format and also lists the top 10 keywords. While writing this some of the top tags are iowa penn, quaker oatmeal (I have no idea what that’s about), and nzelection.

12 Seconds – 12 Seconds is an online service for video status updates. It currently can only be searched by username. As it is still in private beta, it is not particularly useful for the majority of Twitter users.

Groups – Groups allows you to organize your followers into managable chunks. This feature is what makes Tweetdeck outshine other Twitter applications. Once you get above 300 individuals in your network it is difficult to keep up with the rapid flow of information.

I currently have three groups; Network, Soccer and Philly. Network includes those who I’ve worked with, had extensive discussions with and those that I want to learn from. Coincidentally, when I took the screenshot, Darren was feeling “easy like Sunday morning”. I am a Soccer/Football fan so this group contains other fans and soccer related news. I have to be very careful with this group when I miss a match and don’t want to know the score. Finally, I live in Philadelphia, PA so I have a Philly group that contains other people who live here and local news. Recently we had a discussion about the proposed city budget and what we could do to stop 11 branches of the library from being permanently closed.

Settings and Preferences – Tweetdeck contains a limited number of settings and preferences.

Refresh – Refresh is a manual update of tweets if you don’t want to wait for the application to update. Doing this too frequently can cause you to exceed the API limit.

Single Column View – This setting allows you to reduce the application to the leftmost pane. I use this to reduce the amount of space the application takes or if I just want to monitor replies to me.

Tweets/Alerts – This is used to set notifications and sounds.

Colors/Fonts – If you don’t like the default black and gray, you can change the color scheme. The application does not currently contain Themes so setting new colors takes some creativity.

Twitter API – This is an important setting. It allows you to set how much of the Twitter API is used for all messages, replies, and direct messages. If you are running Twitter into other programs, such as integrating your status with Facebook or displaying Tweets on your blog, you can easily exceed the rate limit and not get updates for some time. I had a problem with this because of a WordPress plugin I was using. I reduced my API usage to 30% total, uninstalled the plugin, and am slowly increasing my usage.

Issues

While the integrated features, especially Groups, make Tweetdeck an indispensable program for the power user it is not without it’s problems.

Memory Usage – I have had Tweetdeck open for 5 days and it is using over 600MB of memory. I have heard people report 1GB of usage. If you leave your computer and Tweetdeck running all of the time, you will have to restart it periodically.

Groups

1. If you accidentally close the group pane, you will lose that group and it is necessary to recreate it. Once you have a large network, scrolling through all of the users to recreate the group is tedious. This is more of an inconvenience but for some reason I closed one of my groups twice in the last week. This, however, may be a sign of my own incompetence.

2. Additionally, it is best to wait 24 hours of actively running Tweetdeck before creating a group. Why? Because people in your network will not show up in the list until they tweet. It generally takes 24 hours for everyone to say something at least once.

3. Something I only noticed recently is that all users show up in the list for creating a group even if you have unfollowed them. This is frustrating because it increases the number of users to scroll through when creating the group.

Size

Tweetdeck, even with only 3 panes open, is a big program. Even the author says that is best used on a second monitor.

Overall, Tweetdeck is one of the best 3rd party applications for for Twitter access and management. If you haven’t tried it already, give it a go and let me know it if worked out for you.

Download TweetDeck for yourself here.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



TweetDeck [Review]