School 2.0 in South Africa

Jan 11 2012

Day 18: Managing twitter from your desktop using tweetdeck

Published by bshallowes under Twitter,Workshops and conferences

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If you have been following the un-workshop you have learned the basics of Twitter.com. Day 17 introduced some ideas on how to keep track of important tweets. Today we will introduce a useful management tool that will make it possible to tweet from multiple “personalities” and help you to keep track of diverse hashtag topics all in one! This will make it possible to separate your personal and teacher personas and even add your facebook account. So you can create a separate twitter account for your teacher role.

The following post was kindly volunteered by a great and inspiring teacher @bhallowes:

So what is Tweetdeck? According to Wikipedia, “TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop application for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn , Google Buzz, Foursquare, and MySpace.” We will be focusing on using it for our Twitter account for now.

Search for Tweetdeck (in Google) and download the free application to your desktop. It will ask you to set up a Tweetdeck account. One can use the same username and password as one’s Twitter account to simplify matters. Once installed, this is what Tweetdeck looks like.

You will notice it is divided into columns. It is these columns that help organise your Twitter account and your hashtags.

The default columns are from left, All Friends (this is where your Twitter stream appears – rather like your timeline in Twitter.com), then Mentions. This means that if anyone re-tweets one of your tweets or mentions you that post will appear in the Mentions column as well as in the All Friends column. The last default column is Direct Messages. This is where your direct messages that you send or receive will appear. They will not show up in your All Friends column because they are to or from you personally.

At the top left of your Tweetdeck your will see the three buttons for action. They look like this:

The yellow square with the pen is for writing a new tweet. Click on it and give it a try. Send a tweet telling us you now have Tweetdeck installed. Don’t forget to add #ict4champions to the end of your tweet. Great!

The next button is a circle with a plus sign in it. This is to add a column to your Tweetdeck. Click and you will see a window open in the middle of your deck.

You can then give your column a name using a hashtag #. If you were setting up a new event such as a conference, you would create your own hashtag, but in the case of this un-workshop the hashtag #ict4champions is used. Type it into the box and press Search. What do you see? A new column should appear with the hashtag at the top and very soon the column is populated with the tweets that have been sent using that hashtag. Now you can see at a glance who has posted to the un-workshop and who is and active in the course.

Remember that if you have a lot of columns on your deck you just have to use the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the deck to move across and view them. Try adding another hashtag such as #sateachers or #edtechconf.

The last of the three action buttons at the top left of your deck is for finding a quick profile or list. If you have seen a tweet that looks interesting and you might want to follow the person but you’d like to check out their profile first try this:

Click on the Quick Profile button and type the twitter name of the person you want to view in the window that appears. A new column opens up with the profile of the person you are thinking of following. You will also find a Follow button at the bottom of their profile column. Click it to add them to the list of people you follow and then close the profile. You will now be following that person.

Below these three action buttons on the left is your account/ accounts that are logged into Tweetdeck. You may set up a number of accounts – such as a personal one, a school account or a class account. They can all be logged into Tweetdeck by clicking the Add More Accounts button. When you want to send a tweet you can click on one or more of your accounts and the tweet will be sent from them all – or just the one you choose.

Now move across to the top right of your Tweetdeck where you’ll find five more buttons. These are Refresh, Single Column View (you can toggle between single and multi column view with this one), Settings, Support and Log Out. These five buttons are pretty much self-explanatory and they are best explored and experimented with at leisure. Below these five buttons, also on the right, is the option to add one’s location, upload a photo or a video or log out.

Now we come to the fun part of the Tweetdeck. This is the open strip below the buttons where you will type your tweet. You would then press Send. If you are copying a URL from a website it’s best to select the text, press Ctrl+C to copy it and then click next to your tweet text and use Ctrl+V to paste it. One trick Tweetdeck does is to auto shorten your URL’s. Make sure the auto shortening facility is on by clicking the button below the typing strip and to the left of the hashtag button. Click it to select ON.

If you are part of an event like this workshop remember to add the hashtag e.g. #ict4educators. In order to facilitate the easy addition of hashtags, Tweetdeck has a button below the typing area with the # on it. This will open a drop down menu and if you click on that it will give a list of all your recently used hashtags. Double click the one you want and it will be inserted at the end of your Tweet. Now all that remains is to press Send on the right.

The last thing for you to do is explore the set of buttons at the bottom of each column. Columns can be moved to the left or the right of your Tweetdeck depending on their popularity; they can be filtered by different criteria; marked as read and cleared of all seen tweets.

To close a column, look for the blue Twitter t on the top right of the column next to your user name. As you hover over it an X will appear and pressing that will close the column.

But how does one retweet or send a direct message using Tweetdeck? Hover over the avatar in a tweet The icon will change into four squares with different functions. Hover your mouse over an avatar and see what happens.

Did you find the re-tweet and reply buttons? Find a tweet you would like to reply to and click on the reply button. Reply to a tweet from someone in the un-workshop and let them know you have found the reply button in Tweetdeck.

Try clicking the re-tweet button on the avatar. The tweet will now appear in your message pane and the beauty of Tweetdeck is that you can Edit the tweet before sending it! Once you have selected a tweet to send try adding the #ict4champions hashtag to let everyone in the unworkshop know how fantastically fast you catch on.

The third button on the avatar is the Direct Message button (the one that looks like an envelope). When you send a direct message to someone it will appear in your Direct Messages column of your Tweetdeck. Lastly explore the Other Actions part of the avatar. Use this option to carry out one action on this tweet such as email it to someone or translate it – or whichever action grabs your fancy.

That covers the basics for installing and using Tweetdeck. This is by no means an exhaustive tutorial and it’s for you to play and explore and share your findings with the un-workshop. We all learn from one another. Enjoy!

Activity:

Install Tweetdeck by going to http://www.tweetdeck.com and download the application.
Create a separate column for your #ict4champions twitter stream
Send a tweet telling us that you have installed it and that you are ready to post from multiple personalities!
Retweet one tweet sent by another member of the un-workshop.
Reply to at least one tweet from a member of the un-workshop.
Carry out one “other action” on a tweet – don’t forget to add #ict4champions.

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