tweetdeck

So you’ve signed up for Twitter, you’re tweeting some, you’re following some people but you’re getting totally overwhelmed. How do you keep up with the people and topics that are most important to you without having to stress about the rest?

It’s time to get organized and prioritized with Twitter lists, hashtags, and Tweetdeck.

Twitter Lists

A few months ago, Twitter introduced a feature that allows users to organize the people they are following into lists. While you’re logged in to twitter.com you’ll see a section in the right sidebar titled lists with an option below it to create a new list. Lists can be private: only you can see who is on the list or public: everyone can see who is on the list. I keep most of my lists private in effort not to offend anyone. I have a variety of lists to sort people by how I found/know them and what topics they mainly tweet about.

Hashtags

Hashtags are keywords or phrases preceded by the # symbol in a tweet. Hashtags are used for groups of people to discuss certain topics or upcoming events so that all the related tweets can easily be grouped together. If you’re replying to a tweet that includes a hashtag and you want all the other hashtag followers to be able to read your reply, make sure to include the hashtag in your reply (Tweetdeck will do this automatically for you).

Putting it all together in Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck allows you to create columns to group updates by social network (I use Tweetdeck for Facebook and Foursquare as well as Twitter), lists, hashtags, searches, and many other items.

With the Tweetdeck window maximized to take up my entire computer screen I can see 5 full columns at once (ok, so I wrote that in regards to my 15″ MacBook Pro; on the 27″ iMac I can see almost 10 full columns and that’s information overload so I had to make the window smaller). I’ve prioritized my columns so that the ones that are most important to me to keep up with are on the left and I can scroll right to check out the less important columns as it is convenient and interesting for me to so.

So when I open Tweetdeck, I see:

• Facebook (keeping up with my real life friends is a priority over Twitter for me)
• Twitter mentions and direct messages (Twitter communications with or about me)
• my exclamation mark list (the Twitter people I most want to keep up with)
• and then the hashtag columns start…

I’ve currently got columns for 9 hashtags mostly related to blogging and some upcoming events I’m attending. I’m interested in reading these things but if I don’t have the time or interest to keep up with all these tweets that is a-okay.

After the hashtags I’ve got:

• my Twitter “All Friends” column which contains the 200 most recent tweets among all of the people I’m following on Twitter (there’s no way I could constantly keep up with that column but sometimes I scroll through and see if I have anything to add to those conversations)
• New Followers (I do check out everyone individually and see if I want to follow back but I usually do this in just one batch a day so it’s not a priority for me to see those right away)
• Foursquare (which is occasionally interesting but the major advantage of this column is that it removes all the Foursquare check in updates from your other columns and keeps them neater)

One feature I’d really, really love for Tweetdeck to introduce that would make this system even more efficient would be if I’ve marked a tweet as read in one column, it’d be marked as read in all of my columns because some of the same tweets currently show up in 3 or 4 columns.

How do you organize and prioritize your use of Twitter?

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