Different Twitter Tools for Different Tasks

As an enthusiastic user of Twitter for professional and personal reasons, I use a variety of tools to take care of all my needs. Here’s a breakdown of my Twitter “tool box”:

- TweetDeck is my go-to tool due to the ability to create and review a wide variety of columns to track people I follow, @ messages, direct messages and keywords. This make using Twitter extremely efficient because it quickly offers a snapshot of the Twitter landscape.

- Like TweetDeck, Seesmic is a desktop tool that features the use of multiple columns. In doing work for Sysomos, I use Seesmic to provide me with a glimpse at what’s happening within the social media monitoring and analytics industry, including Sysomos’ competitors. The one area in which TweetDeck clearly outshines Seesmic is the ability to automatically shorten URL but this is a small quibble.

- Heartbeat is a social media monitoring service from Sysomos that covers the entire social media landscape, including Twitter. It features automated sentiment, geo-demographics, on-the-fly translation, workflow management and integration with Salesforce.com.

- HootSuite is an online service that competes against TweetDeck and Seesmic. While it can be used as a way to publish and read tweets, I mostly use it for two reasons: scheduling tweets for the future, and using its integration with Ping.fm to multiple to multiple social media services (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) at the same time.

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