How To Rule at Twitter with Advanced TweetDeck Strategies

Check out my festive Facebook status from back in the day! Courtesy of TweetDeck.

It wasn’t just Twitter pros that took note of TweetDeck’s awesomeness. Mid 2011 Twitter came calling and purchased TweetDeck for roughly $31 million and retained Dodsworth as part of Twitter’s staff. In the proceeding years Twitter has pared down TweetDeck into a Twitter-only, web-based service.

But TweetDeck isn’t just for Twitter pros. It’s a brand’s best friend, too!

In this post we’ll walk you through basic account setup and give you some tips that will help you get the social media magic moving along.

TweetDeck Setup

Because Twitter owns TweetDeck, signing up for an account is halfway done if you already have a Twitter account. Just head to https://tweetdeck.twitter.com and click the blue Log in button if you already have a Twitter account or click Sign up now if you’re new to Twitter altogether.

From there you’ll log in with your Twitter credentials and bam, you’re part of the club! Once you’re in, TweetDeck has a number of default columns set up. You can leave these as is (not recommended) or you can make some changes and fully harness the power of Twitter with TweetDeck (highly recommended).

If you’re going the customizable route you have a number of columns types you can add to your new dashboard.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what each column does for you:

• Home – This is how you view your Twitter timeline
• Notifications – Where you’ll see interactions on your account including likes, retweets, follows, mentions, etc.
• Mentions – Displays any tweets where you’re tagged
• Mentions (all accounts) – Any tweets you’re tagged in across multiple accounts
• Activity – Shows every activity the accounts you follow perform
• Likes – Shows every tweet you’ve liked
• Lists – View the tweets from the accounts within a Twitter list
• Scheduled – Shows what Tweets you have scheduled to post in the future (TweetDeck only)
• Search – Allow you to save searches including hashtags, other users, keywords, etc.
• Messages – View all direct messages
• Messages (all accounts) – View direct messages across multiple accounts
• User – Displays tweets from your account
• Trending – Shows you what’s trending across Twitter and allows you to monitor Tweets from these trends
• Collections – Displays your group of hand-selected tweets in your collection

You might have already figured this out, but it’s worth a mention that you can add more than one Twitter account to TweetDeck. This is very helpful for someone who runs multiple accounts and doesn’t want to log in and out of different accounts.

The Essentials

What each marketer needs to effectively manage its brand on Twitter differs by brand. With that being said, having each of the columns mentioned below will at least bring you up to speed as far as what Twitter offers natively inside of its apps and website:

• Scheduled
• Home
• User
• Notifications
• Messages

To make this experience even more pleasant we recommend you install a TweetDeck enhancement browser extension like BetterTweetDeck 3 which adds additional customizations, emoji input, and more!

Sharing Tweets

One of the significant downfalls of native Twitter is the inability to schedule content. Thankfully this is an area where TweetDeck fills in the gap, even if it’s not as easy as using a publishing tool like Buffer.

Scheduling content is as simple as clicking the Compose button (the one that looks like a paper and quill) at the top of the left side navigation bar. From there, you can choose to tweet now or choose to tweet at a later time. Adding pictures or emojis (only if you’ve installed a TweetDeck enhancement browser extension) is highly recommended for increasing engagement.

Setting up Search Columns

One of TweetDeck’s most amazing features is its search columns. These search columns allow you to search, save, and monitor content, users, and more. Here are a few of our favorite search column uses:

• Monitor your favorite hashtags – Social media isn’t just about sharing your brand’s content. It’s about listening and engaging, too.
• Don’t miss a tweet from your favorite Twitter accounts – Is there a brand, influencer, news source, or parody account you just can’t get enough of? Use a search column to view every tweet.
• Easily monitor a Twitter list – Twitter lists can be effective ways to group accounts. You may want to create lists of your employees to track how effectively they are sharing your content, a list of customers, or a list of industry experts who you’d like to engage with regularly.
• Monitor keywords (A.K.A social listening)– This one is tricky, but worthwhile. It’s a matter of specificity and scalability. If you’re a plumber you could set up a search that monitors keywords like “broken pipe” searching for potential customers and you’re bound to find a few relevant tweets. Other keyword searches like “digital marketing” will have much higher volumes and might become impossible to manage.

To set up a search column, click on the Search link (looks like a magnifying glass) and type away. Once you have found the content or user(s) you’d like to monitor, click the Add Column at the bottom of the search pane.

For big wins, use boolean search operators in your searches:

• AND
• OR
• NOT
• ()
• “”

Search operators will help you find specific content or users or allow you to combine two or more searches into a single result. Here’s a great beginner’s guide to boolean search.

Setting Up Search Columns, Part Duex

If someone likes your content it’s not uncommon for them to share it and to tag your brand, the individual author, or both. What about times they don’t? TweetDeck search columns to the rescue! A properly set up search column gives you the ability to monitor those untagged shares of URLs even if they’ve been link-shortened.

The beauty of these URL search columns is that you can monitor any URL, not just your own. You could monitor the shares of content written by a competing brand or content that discusses pain points your product or service addresses which can help you know who to engage with.

Pro Tip

One of the most important benefits social media, and in this instance Twitter, offers brands is the ability to drive awareness and to lay the foundation for meaningful business relationships. Traditionally we think about accomplishing these objectives at scale when it comes to social media, but the reality is that the world’s most powerful brands were built by winning over individual people one at a time.

One tool that can help you gain a better understanding of what a prospective customer is interested in is called Riffle. Riffle provides high-level, actionable information about which social accounts you can find someone on, what they tweet about, how often, how much engagement each tweet receives, who they tag, and what URLs they share. This information will help you to know the topics, content, and platforms your audience loves.

In the right hands and with the right setup TweetDeck is a powerful marketing tool that can be used to drive social media ROI. Let us know if we missed any TweetDeck tips you’d like included in this guide!