subject: Programs To Assist You In Selling Your Accounting Services On Twitter [print this page] Have you been hearing a lot about Twitter recently? I know I've been talking about it continually. Twitter is the new golden child of internet marketing, and not without good reason. Marketing to the "Twittosphere" is a uniquely good idea for those us with service-based businesses. You'll find this online environment teeming with colleagues, clients, and prospects.
Twitter is not without it's downside, though. The number of tweets you'll be seeing will quickly become overwhelming. You may already be dealing with these challenges. If you're already on Twitter you know that even once you learn how to use hashtags it's not particularly well organized. Twitter has a lot of "noise" to sift through. You need to pick through a lot of tweets to find the ones you should engage.
To make it easier to operate in this strange new world a handful of applications exist to organize your tweets and make you more efficient.
There's more than one way to access Twitter. Most people just log in through the Twitter website. Obviously you should assume this is how most of your followers are viewing your posts. Consider this the main method of accessing the service. It's certainly not the only way, though. There are also a variety of third party programs for use with your desktop, notebook, or mobile device. Some people use them because they can be slicker looking, but for the most part they also have tools that make it easier to manage large numbers of tweets. We'll explore a few of these.
TweetDeck
One app that's been around for a while, Seesmic Desktop, has evolved into this popular app. With this program, you can log in to and manage multiple accounts, organized in columns, of which the default includes all friends, mentions, and direct messages.
TweetDeck also allows you to follow trending topics, one of the marketer's best friends. Finally, it has also been expanded to support Facebook and Foursquare. You can even access hash tag searches quickly and easily. The program is free.
Tweetie and Twitterific
If you're looking for a simpler solution there are a lot of choices. Tweetie and Twitterific are the most popular choices. Both are payware, with advertisements popping up without a license. These programs bear the standard trademarks of the Twitter client, with easy access to mentions and direct messages.
TwitWipe
One challenge with Twitter is the how cumbersome it is to delete tweets. Under normal circumstances, the only way to do this is by logging in and deleting the tweets by hand. It's easy enough to delete a few tweets at a time, but sooner or later you're going to want to delete all your previous tweets. When that time comes you could have thousands of tweets piled up. Deleting that many tweets just isn't practical.
This app can help you. It's a web based utility rather than an installed application. Using this tool you can quickly and easily delete as many tweets as you may need to delete in a single operation. You can get it free at it's website: twitwipe.com.
Heads Up: TwitWipe erases all the tweets from your account. As far as I know, there isn't any way to pick and choose between your tweets. Also, be warned. The developer is a crass, astoundingly unprofessional fellow and has absolutely no marketing savvy whatsoever. He drops the F-Bomb and cusses like a schoolboy all over his website. The product itself, however, works exactly as advertised.
Get Organized and then Get Started
These apps make it less difficult to get into Twitter without getting overwhelmed. Twitter now has about 75 million users globally.
