My research and experience on how to manage multiple twitter accounts.
Twitter has already become an integral part of every marketer’s social media strategy. During the initial days of twitter people were not too sure on its business potential and only thought of it as a personal / social networking tool. The sheer volume of twitter follower and tweets has forced everyone sit back and have a close look at twitter and find innovative ways to use twitter for personal as well as business use. I have been a twitter user since its early days and the challenge for me is multi-fold, I would like to:
- Use twitter to manage my personal and professional contacts
- At the same time I would like to promote my blog, a niche concept / service
- Tweet on behalf on behalf of my company.
As a result today I have 4 twitter accounts and I know for a fact that there are many people like me who have multiple twitter accounts. Since twitter is such a cool concept that a lot of people have created businesses by developing some really nice applications to work with twitter. I researched the internet and found a lot of options but no conclusive answer.
I decided to use each application for a couple of days and see which application is the best way to manage multiple twitter accounts.
Applications that I tried and measured over a week are:
| Features |
Applications |
||||||
| twhirl | TweetDeck | Hootsuite | Splittweet | Twitterfox | Tweet3 | Matt | |
| Desktop based |
Yes |
Yes | |||||
| Web Based | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Single instance for all accounts | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Multiple instances for all accounts |
Yes |
||||||
| Same tweet to all accounts | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||
| Cross posting | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||||
| Video sharing | Yes | Yes | |||||
| Image sharing | Yes | ||||||
| @ replies | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| ReTweet | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| DM | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Search /Scan | Yes | Yes | |||||
| Brand Monitoring | Yes | ||||||
| Creating groups | Yes | ||||||
| URL shortening | Yes | Optional | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| User friendly | Good | Bad | Excellent | Average | Excellent | Average | Good |
| Analytics | Yes | Yes | |||||
| Scheduled Tweets | Yes | ||||||
Summary:
I tried these applications one after the another and also simultaneously for a period of one week and I have measured them on their usability, performance and rich functionalities. After trying all the bells and whistles in each tool I decided that I would still go with Twitterfox for now. The reason being it’s a small Firefox extension, it’s smart, simple, easy to use and right in my browser. Only thing I miss and I wish to have is the analytics peace in Twitterfox. If I were to still go ahead and use all those fancy features and be willing to work outside my current browser window then I would go for Hootsuite.
Related posts:
- 6 part series – Topic 2 – Twitter
- twitcam and camtweet to offer live video streaming on twitter
- TweetDeck + TwitterJobSearch = JobDeck – helps you find your next job.
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TwitterOnTheRun is an automated self-sustaining TWITTER program that follows Tweeters who are interested in what you are interested in on TWITTER. You tell the program which Tweeters are already talking about what you are about, and it follows for you just like the specified Tweeter follows. When you follow Tweeters who have common interests with you on TWITTER, they are highly likely to follow you back. Then you can get your message out to all of them with one simple tweet or more tweets, if you choose!