How I Use Twitter & CoTweet

CoTweet Rules!

When you’re juggling your digital life, your clients digital life and everything else that falls in between, my Twitter Savior is CoTweet. CoTweet allows its users to manage up to 6 accounts with one user login name. Having a platform to focus on multiple conversations across various twitter accounts permits businesses and personal tweeters to keep their Twitter life active and thriving. I efficiently manage my personal account @yiannig and GradeGuru’s business account @gradeguru with multiple team members (marketing, technical support and customer service).

For business purposes, CoTweet helps companies organize the execution of their Twitter presence and engage with their customers using Twitter. Through CoTweet, you can give tweet assignments to your colleagues to follow up with tweets from your customers and keep track through conversation threading to their responses. The application will present which tweets have been responded to and display which of your colleagues responded to whom. There is also the option of Tweet Scheduling, which gives you the ability to prepare tweets ahead of time and deliver a consistent flow of updates throughout the day. However, if not used carefully this can dehumanize your twitter brand and become slightly robotic. The purpose of Twitter and social media is to engage naturally with your customer!

More Twitter Applications I Use:

iPhone App: Tweetie

Tweetie allows you to handle multiple Twitter accounts, view your timeline, replies, direct messages favorites, post pictures and shorten urls. You can also browse friends, followers, post new tweets, retweets, reply to @replies and direct messages. You can follow and unfoloow people and basically your twizness (twitter +business) from the palm of your hand.

Blackberry App: Tiny Twitter

Tiny Twitter seems to be rocking the Blackberry and Windows Mobile Decice Twitter world. It give you font and sunc settings with a Tweet Ticker that runs showing your most recent tweets. Any other Blackberry apps out there?

Twitter Search: Use Twitter search to find certain keywords in all the conversation happening in real time. This is an essential tool for any kind of proactive marketing or customer service Twitter strategy. (CoTweet also has a Twitter search functionality integrated in it and you can run mutitple queries at a time).

TweetBeep – Gives free Twitter alerts by email, similar to Google Alerts. This tool allows you to keep track of various conversations based on your assigned keywords such as you company name, your competitors or particular products (CoTweet als has this function).

Twitpic – Lets you share picture on Twitter. You can post picture to Twitpic from you phone, API – upload an image to TwitPic and send it as a status udpate, or post to the site itself.

Bit.ly – Used for URL shortening. I love the tracking referral tool that comes with bit.ly and CoTweet also allows you to link your bit.ly account to it. You want to shorten your URLs because Twitter only allows you 140 characters for each tweet, limiting what you can say if you use a long URL. You also always want to leave 20 free characters or so so others can ReTweet your posts (refered to as “RT” on a tweet).

New Twitter applications are created everyday for all sorts of uses. It you have a great app suggestions, DM me @yiannig or comment below. I’ll do my best to keep you posted on the most effective stuff I find to make your tweeting experience a productive and fun one.