How To Manage Twitter

Knowing how to manage Twitter will help you use it to its full potential without taking up too much of your time. Twitter can be a fun distraction, a resource of useful information, a way to keep up with friends and family and a modern marketing tool, but depending on how many people you are following, it can also be difficult to keep up with. There are a variety of tools available to help you manage your Twitter account for both receiving and outputting information.

1. Create lists. The list feature on Twitter lets you create your own lists by category and place people you follow in those lists. This way you can quickly view current news or updates from friends and family without weeding through everyone else you follow.
2. Use a desktop or web application. These allow you to leave Twitter open behind whatever else you are doing. Some applications, like Seesmic and Twhirl, also allow you to manage multiple Twitter accounts at the same time.
3. Keep up to date with applications for your cell phone or smart phone. There are generic applications that are targeted toward all mobile phones, as well as specific applications for iPhone, Android and Blackberry.
4. Manage your personal or professional brand by streamlining messages across multiple social networking sites. HootSuite is a free service that allows you to manage and update your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts all at once. You can manage multiple accounts for all of these sites at once. Create an update and pick and choose where you want to publish it.
5. Keep everyone in your company in the loop and increase response time. CoTweet gives you a platform to manage multiple Twitter accounts, but has the added feature of allowing you to review a tweet and then assign it to someone else within your company to investigate and/or reply to.
6. Integrate RSS feed and monitor statistics. With HootSuite, you can seamlessly monitor RSS feeds and dispatch headlines to your Twitter feeds automatically. EasyTweets is another service that offers this feature, as well as giving you access to track RSS traffic from Twitter through Google Analytics.