I’ll admit it: I love Twitter!

I love the ability to interact with people in a timely way. I love that information flows quickly. I love the range of things that I can find. I love being exposed to new ideas and new people from all walks of life and from all over the world.

What I don’t love is how fast everything flies by. If I step away for even a few minutes, I’ve missed more tweets than I can hope to consume before an entire new batch arrives. It’s a never-ending, unwinnable battle. Yet there is so much out there that I had to find a way to slow the flood down to a manageable amount.

I started with creating Twitter lists. With a list, you can limit the number of accounts that are included, and you can see only the tweets from those on the list. This allowed me to group folks who tweeted about similar subjects. At the time, I was only using my personal Twitter account, and I ended up with 23 lists. I had a list for politics, one for sports, and another for humor. The lists were fairly narrow in their scope, but they allowed me to seek out information of a similar type and scroll through it rather quickly. I could review the lists on my iPhone, iPad, or on my computer. Switching between lists wasn’t terribly difficult in the official Twitter app or on the website, but it still took a bit of time. More importantly, I could only see one list at a time. When I added my @HecticDad01 account I created a situation where I had to log out of one account and then into the other. Then I added accounts for the other Hectic- properties and things became dramatically more complicated.

It became obvious that I needed a solution that would allow me to see multiple accounts as well as my lists simultaneously. I searched the internet. I tried out a series of solutions on my iPhone and my computer. I’d spend a day or two with a solution and eventually run into a reason that it wouldn’t work. I got frustrated. Not a little frustrated, but sufficiently frustrated that I actually considered abandoning Twitter altogether. The information I was gathering simply wasn’t worth the effort to sort through all the fluff. And honestly I was having a severe case of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). At times I look back and wonder what was going on in my head, other times I realize that I still have the FOMO issue, but I handle it better. Part of the reason I handle it better is that I finally found a solution for my Twitter accounts that is coming close to meeting all my needs: Tweetdeck.

The simplest description of Tweetdeck is that it’s a multi-column Twitter. While it has many other capabilities, that’s the easiest way for somebody not familiar with Tweetdeck to grasp the interface. In my case, I started off with a column for my personal account, one for @HecticDad01, and another for each of the other Hectic- accounts. This allowed me to view all my Twitter feeds in separate columns simultaneously. This was huge! With just a glance I could review all my accounts. I could focus on the ones with lots of activity, and if I stepped away, the backlog didn’t seem so great.

While a column can contain your feed, just like the Twitter user interface, it can do so much more. Columns can also contain the results of searches, the contents of your lists, all the mentions of your Twitter handle, or even all the direct messages sent to you. If you have multiple Twitter accounts, you can have each one in a separate column. You can even have a column dedicated to all the tweets form a particular individual. If you follow your kids on Twitter, you can create a list with each of their Twitter accounts attached and then have all their tweets gathered together. That’s really helpful when they’re Twitter-bashing you and you want to nip it in the bud quickly. I may or may not have done that…I’ll never tell!

While many people perceive Twitter as a time waster, it’s a productivity tool for me. It’s the way I interact with folks from all over the world. It’s a source for tons of really interesting information that I would have trouble gathering and consuming otherwise. With the implementation of Tweetdeck, I’ve been able to consume the information with even greater efficiency. As far as productivity tools go, Tweetdeck is one the essential ones for me.

In the next few posts about the Tools I Use I’ll address using lists, filtering, tracking followers, scheduling tweets, interacting with direct messages, using collections, and using searches (including hashtags) within Tweetdeck. While I’m not a bonified power user, I do make use of many of the capabilities of Tweetdeck to get things done.

If you’re looking for an in-depth tutorial about Tweetdeck you can go to the Getting Started With Tweetdeck information from Twitter or take a look at Gizmodo’s excellent Tweetdeck Field Guide.

If you’re interested, go to Tweetdeck and get started. It’s part of the Twitter suite of tools and it’s free!