Blogging 101: Guide to Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a tool where you can see your twitter feed, tweet, respond to DM’s and even schedule tweets. It’s not a fully automated system for you to increase traffic to your blog, but it really helps you to organically and naturally engage with others on twitter.

Columns

Tweetdeck’s columns are how you see exactly what you want to see from your twitter. There’s your usual feed, notifications, messages and I always have my scheduled posts on screen as well. This makes it slightly easier to see everything in one place and you can customise your columns to how you want to see them.

You can also follow a specific hashtag or person and filter the results afterwards as well. For example, I have the #bloggerswanted hashtag visible and have filtered it to have over 5RT’s and 5 Likes in the results, this tends to push out any bloggers wrongly using the hashtag to promote their posts.

This function also works really well when you’re trying to follow a hashtag such as for a twitter chat. You can place your notifications column directly next to your hashtag one, and so won’t need to constantly switch between the search function and notifications on your phone hoping you haven’t missed anything (which I’ve done before and is exhausting honestly).

Take note of the column numbers as well, if you tap that number on your keyboard you scroll right across to it. You can drag this columns around to change up the order too.

Scheduling

Using Tweetdeck you can manually schedule tweets to whichever time you want. There’s no limit to how many you schedule except how much time you want to put into it. You just type your tweet and include your relevant mentions and hashtags. You can add images as usual, but if you want to use gifs you’ll have to download it and upload it into Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck will automatically shorten any URL’s you use.

Under the usual compose tweet part of Tweetdeck you’ll see a schedule tweet button. Expanding this allows you to choose the date and time of the tweet. After you’ve scheduled your tweets you can see them in the Schedule column where it allows you to edit or delete them if needed.

Search Filters

Sentiment

To find tweets that have a positive or negative sentiment around a topic you can use a happy or sad emoticon ( 🙂 or 🙁 ). For example, brands may have a column with ‘Brand Name :(‘ to pick up any negative tweets and offer customer service.

You can use similar tactics by using these search terms to drive people to your posts. If someone is being negative about SEO for example, and you have a post to explain SEO easily then you can link them to it.

 

Advanced Search Operators

Advanced search operators can help you find tweets relating more clearly to what you’re looking for. You can find tweets from Uptown Oracle containing the word blogging and find most of my tweets about the blogging 101 series. You might want to find tweets about certain products or brands, or maybe you’re just curious about what certain people have previously said about X, Y and Z.

• X AND Y – Find tweets containing both X and Y
• X OR Y – Find tweets containing X or Y
• -X – Find tweets excluding X
• “X Y” – Find tweets with complete phrase of X Y
• filter:news – Find tweets with a link to a news story
• filter:safe  – Exclude NSFW tweets
• from:user – Find tweets sent from specific user
• to:user – Find tweets replying to a specific user
• “+@user” – Find tweets mentioning a username

Engage

If you set up your columns, start scheduling and use the search function to find conversations Tweetdeck is an amazing tool to increase your engagement with others. Remeber though that the key to get engagement from others is to actually put in effort yourself. If you don’t actively talk to others on twitter and just schedule your tweets without checking your feed you won’t see any uplift.