Basics of Twitter — Part 2

In Part 1 I focused on the the basics of get­ting started with Twit­ter and fin­ished with some of the options to send/receive Tweets (in tech­ni­cal terms “client options”). As there are a num­ber of approaches avail­able to you, I wanted to focus this blog entry specif­i­cally on this topic:

Before you read on:

With­out div­ing into painful tech­ni­cal details that most peo­ple don’t care about, Kevin fleshed out the fol­low­ing dia­gram to demon­strate the Twit­ter clients that I will touch upon in this entry:

What is com­mon across all of the solutions:

1. You will use the same Twit­ter account for any/all of the solu­tions discussed.
2. You can be logged into the same Twit­ter account in mul­ti­ple clients run­ning at the same time.
3. Some clients may require you to cre­ate an account with that service.

So with that as a background/refresher we can start talk­ing about client options.

Option  #1 — Browser Based Clients

I often encounter peo­ple that aren’t famil­iar with the term “Browser”. Browser is the “generic” term for the appli­ca­tion you use to access the Inter­net (such as Inter­net Explorer, Fire­fox, Safari or Chrome).

Regard­less of the browser you are using, if you go to www.twitter.com and “Log In”, you will be using the native Twit­ter client. In terms of func­tion­al­ity, it’s a sim­ple appli­ca­tion, but it allows you to do the basics — namely send and receive tweets.

There are other browser based ser­vices that pro­vide more func­tion­al­ity than Twit­ter. One site is called Hoot­suite. Hoot­suite pro­vides you with sig­nif­i­cantly more func­tion­al­ity than the native Twit­ter client. For exam­ple, you could sched­ule a tweet (or tweets) at pre­de­ter­mined times. As Hoot­suite is its own ser­vice, you need to first cre­ate an account at the Hoot­suite site. Once you log into Hoot­suite, you can then add your Twit­ter account.

Option #2  —  Locally Installed Applications

There are a num­ber of appli­ca­tions that are avail­able in this space. To run these pro­grams you need to down­load and install a client onto your work­sta­tion. As an exam­ple, one client that I have been exper­i­ment­ing with is called Tweet­deck.

Option #3  — Access via Smart Phones

As I haven’t inves­ti­gated all of the options, if you have a smart phone, such as an Android or an iPhone, you can down­load an appli­ca­tion, usu­ally free, that allows you to receive and send Tweets regard­less of where you are. (I may cover this addic­tion in another post …). As I am an Android user, I have been using the Twit­droid appli­ca­tion which works well.

What Approach Is Right for You?

The short answer — there is no right approach! It really depends on:

• What you are try­ing to accomplish.
• How sophis­ti­cated you are.
• What your com­fort level with the tools/services are.

A key con­sid­er­a­tion between “browser based” and “locally installed” clients is avail­abil­ity (or some might say con­ve­nience). Browser based clients are acces­si­ble no mat­ter where you are (home, work, vaca­tion), while locally installed appli­ca­tions can only be accessed when you are in front of that machine.

Also, there is noth­ing stop­ping you from using Hoot­suite and Tweet­deck simul­ta­ne­ously (remem­ber you can be logged into Twit­ter through mul­ti­ple meth­ods), so you should try each one and see which best meets your needs.

To fin­ish Part II, some thoughts I would like to share:

• Clients like Hoot­suite and Tweet­deck allow you to have mul­ti­ple accounts (that is some­thing I will talk about in a later blog entry).
• If you fol­low peo­ple that only describe their every­day move­ments, you will get bored quickly (unless of course some­one has a very enter­tain­ing life).
• A good start­ing place to find peo­ple to fol­low is search.twitter.com. This allows you to search for sub­jects of inter­est to you, and you can then fol­low the peo­ple you find interesting.

Pop­u­lar­ity: 11%

Tags: digital presence, phone, smartphone, Social Networking, social networks, twitter

Category: News