How to: A Beginners Guide to TweetDeck

Do you have Twitter? Well if you’re furiously refreshing Twitter.com to get your latest tweets maybe it’s time for you to turn to software and a Twitter client.  It’s a growing market and there are loads out there as I mentioned in my last blog post but today I’m going to focus on one of the market leaders -- TweetDeck.  A easy to use program yet full of features, TweetDeck will serve your needs whatever.

So first of all you are going to be concerned with the looks of the software and TweetDeck satisfies that by presenting a clean outlook.  Buttons are neatly arranged at the top giving you numerous options if you want but also unobtrusive enough to forget if you don’t want them. The colours come default as dark greys, black and white but you can customise all of these to whatever you want so if pink and yellow are your favourite colours you’re sorted… There are no flashy graphics here, nothing absurdly popping out with the only thing being your Twitter’s avatars and if you like something to stand out then this may not be it but then again it’s the Twitter content that counts!

The biggest advantage of TweetDeck is it’s features. Literally everything about Twitter you need has been well implemented into the user interface so you have all the power.  You’ll see the usual shorten links option, Twitpic uploads and even seeing the recent Twitter trends. However one of my favourite additions is the “Group” feature where out of all the people you’re following you can choose a select few to see their recent tweets in a new column. For example say you follow everyone that follows you, the problem is the few people you are really interested get lost in the enormous amount of tweets so with the group option you can put them in there.  That way you can have the main feed column with everyone and then your selected people on another column. Great! The newest feature is Facebook integration, which means you can now update your Facebook status from within TweetDeck without having to open up facebook.com.  This would be useful for people who are on it a lot but I find for me personally it’s just not for me but it is nice to have it there.  There is also a translate feature so you can talk to people abroad however I can’t vouch for its translation quality, we all know how poor Google translate can be…

So there it is a beginners guide to using TweetDeck and I hope it helps you if you’re treading carefully into the new world of Twitter. It’s an amazing world out there so feel free to experiment and if you use any other software or have troubles with TweetDeck, let me know. Have fun everyone!