OK…so I’m soft-launching this Blog to dip my toe into the (seemingly-straight forward) world of WordPress. But I have to say that my past few days have been filled with complete immersion in Twitter-related everything (follow me now). Who knew that 140-character messages about what we’re doing would end up taking over such a large portion of our lives? Bizarre, but hey…no complaints…LOVE the Twitter action. So here’s a few tools I stumbled upon in my quest to get up to speed with all of the 12-year-olds who still know 1000% more about this stuff than I do:
1> Ubertwitter – I have to hand it to my brother-in-law Tony. I was convinced that Twitterberry was the perfect Twitter client for my Blackberry Tour. I mean you open it, tweet away…read your feed…no problem right? Well Tony starts texting about how Ubertwitter has SOOO many better options, and here I am thinking he’s just saying that because he has it and I don’t. Of course within an hour I’m downloading the app to see what the fuss is all about, and lo and behold it not only tweets, but adds a link to WHERE YOU TWEET FROM. How cool is that? Also you can customize the icon size to accommodate a larger portion of the screen for the incoming tweet text. The menu options are simple to access, and it took all of a minute for me to replace the Twitterberry icon with the one for Ubertwitter…nice!
2> HootSuite – Oh man…this web-based (FREE) application is sick. First of all it allows you to keep track of multiple Twitter accounts. I for instance have one for me, and one for the radio show I work with, Keller’s Cellar (follow). HootSuite stays logged in to each account as long as you have it open in your browser (it sleeps after a while but just one click on “Wake Up” and all feeds refresh automatically). Through the use of tabs (similar to Firefox) you can create multi-column groups based on the category of Twitter peeps you follow. For instance, I have one column for Poker Tweets, one column for Music, one for News & Politics, one for Tech Tweets, etc. Now instead of the blob that is my main Twitter feed, I have a focused, organized group of Tweet columns that are grouped by category. ALSO you can post tweets directly from the top of the application window, and choose which account(s) you want to write the tweet from. Just under the Tweet window there is an automatic url shortening tool, which helps you keep links short, maximizing text space in your tweets. Better still is the tracking that HootSuite provides for your shortened url’s. Just go to “Tracking” and you can see click stats on any of your tweeted links. Similar to Google Analytics, it graphs the popularity ratio of the links based on the past month’s worth of activity.
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