TweetDeck vs. Seesmic Desktop

 If you are not using an application, you should definitely consider a desktop application. It allows you to make Twitter more useful with columns that you can customize toward your needs. For instance if you wanted to see who was tweeting about your school you can set up a search about your school and it will be constantly searching within the application.

I wanted to share my experience with two twitter Desktop Applications: Seesmic Desktop and TweetDeck. Both applications are very similar in the face that they are layed out horizontally. The people you are following are in one column, there is another column for direct messages, another for Replies and so on. Both applications are great, but there are some key advantages of Seesmic for a school.

Seesmic Desktop is a great alternative and provides a couple key enhancements that would help with day to day tweeting. The first is that it allows you to monitor multiple twitter accounts, so you can deal with your personal one and your work one in one place. This saves so much time! It's also great because someone you are following on one account might have something you want to share on the other account and it's easy to do that. Another advantage of this application is that it integrates with Facebook much better than TweetDeck. It allows you to see the full message and TweetDeck cuts off the messages.

Try these applications out:
Seesmic Desktop
TweetDeck

You will need Adobe® AIR® in order to run these programs.

Using Social Media Tools to Listen In

Using social media is not only about creating content. It's about listening. It's important for schools or organizations to listen in on the discussions taking place online. Hearing the messages out there can help development of your schools online profile and help you figure out how your messages might transmit (even if it is something you do not begin). Listening in on the conversations taking place can help to generate content or even guide the messages we send out. You might find that there are conversations outside of your normal methods of transmission that you might want to participate.

It's important to remember that monitoring is not about controlling the messages out there, but rather about making use of what is being said. Sometimes the best marketing comes from those one-line messages such as "I miss XXX school."

Conversations may not just take place across one type of social media, but rather in six different venues. It can be overwhelming, but there are a number of tools that you can set up to search to find out what is being said and most of the tools are free.

• Free Social Media Monitoring Tools (Very Comprehensive)
• Free Social Media Monitoring Tools Blog Entry
  
• Social Media Monitoring Tools: 26 Free Online Reputation Tools
• 8 Essential Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
• 19 Free Social Media Tools for Your Dashboard
• Best Buzz Tracking and Social Media Monitoring Tools Comparison Table