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Tools for Managing Your Tweets

Managing your tweets can be a challenge. When I started using Twitter, I was unimpressed with the lack of tools and capability from Twitter’s site.

Most of us like to use an application like Microsoft Word, which is self-contained with all the right tools. Twitter is just the reverse. Twitter’s strength lies in utilizing all of the external tools and applications, each with their unique approach to enhancing your Twitter experience.

The first tool I’ll share with you is TweetDeck. This application allows you to view all of your friends’ tweets in a columned interface.

The neat thing about TweetDeck is that you can group your friends into themed columns. Looking at just one column of “all” of your friends tweets can be overwhelming. I like to create one column (or group) for search-related tweets, one for friends, and one for my favorite sport of cycling.

You can also perform a search of all public tweets for a given keyword or keywords, and save that search as its own column. That’s useful both for reputation management and for discovering users with similar interests as yours.

TweetDeck also provides a one-stop shop to help you craft your tweets, shorten your tweets to fit the 140-character allotment, and even translate tweets from another language.

Another notable tool to consider is twhirl, which has similar functionality, but at this point is not as versatile.

If you use an iPhone or have a smart phone that lets you surf the Internet, you’re in luck. Several tools will help you follow your tweets while you’re on the road. There are even widgets (Mac OS), sidebars (Windows OS) and other kinds of tools you can use. For a list of all of these tools go to the Twitter applications page.