I cannot help but feel a sense of nostalgia when thinking about the first time I downloaded Tweetdeck’s desktop client back in 2009. Of course, Tweetdeck was an independent company back then, and it was part of a growing social application market (worth billions today).
Since then, Twitter acquired Tweetdeck and integrated its core features into the tool. Now power users have all the bells and whistles, while still accessing the experience a la gratis.
Below I’ve gathered a bunch of feedback from power users, and you’ll definitely notice clear trends –>
- Users really like the column layout to access mentions, direct messages, and custom searches
- They love the scheduling feature
- Multi account features are favored
- Users don’t really like the fact that you can’t edit a tweet after scheduling
- Generally, users haven’t had issues with support
- It’s really easy to sign up, since users sign up with their Twitter login details
If you really want to dig into the details, I am making all of the feedback available below. Moreover, if you have additional reviews that you would like to submit, feel free to leave them in the comments!
Source: Scott Ruzal
Having used Tweetdeck since it was a third-party app, along with other various Twitter scheduling and monitoring tools along the way, I know how valuable it is to have a dedicated, reliable platform to use when managing Twitter accounts. That said, Tweetdeck has a few major shortcomings with its posting tool that make it less useful than it could be for power users looking to replace Twitter outright with a more feature-rich management tool.
Valuable features: Tweetdeck is a great way to keep an eye on multiple timelines, hashtags, and notifications all at the same time. This is invaluable for users who need to handle responses to customers or fans in real-time. Similarly, Tweetdeck makes it possible for accounts to be managed by multiple people, which may be necessary for accounts that support multiple brands or properties or deal with a large number of customer service inquiries.
Improvements to my organization: Switching back and forth between multiple accounts and having social teams scheduling posts using multiple apps was a logistics nightmare. Tweetdeck has definitely made internal posting process much smoother.
Room for improvement: Tweetdeck is incapable of posting or scheduling video or GIFs, both of which are becoming increasingly more important to maintain a vibrant mix of content for brands and attract the attention of users who fly through their timelines.
Technical Support: Since being acquired by Twitter, Tweetdeck now has comprehensive support resources located in Twitter’s official help center. For advanced inquiries, Twitter gives users the option to file a support ticket.
Initial Set Up: Perhaps one of the best things about being acquired by Twitter is that adding multiple accounts to your Tweetdeck merely requires logging in to each account. After that, customizing the display of columns and specific search parameters or filters can be somewhat more complicated depending on the use case. The platform itself does a good job of laying out your options and guiding users through the process of setting up the display to their liking.
Requirements: All that’s needed to get started using Tweetdeck is an individual Twitter account. Sign in, poke around, and have fun!
Source: Scott Sundblom
Valuable Features: The most valuable feature TweetDeck offers is the customizable columns. These columns are perfect for staying on top of notifications, hashtags, Twitter lists, untagged mentions, and URL shares.
Improvements to My Organization: TweetDeck has simplified the process of finding brand ambassadors and detractors for our marketing team and our clients. This is accomplished through setting up columns to monitor keywords, URL shares, and hashtags.
Room for Improvement: Because TweetDeck is so diverse, it’s nearly an end-to-end solution for managing the day-to-day of your organization’s Twitter efforts. However, the scheduling feature leaves a lot to be desired and is far more cumbersome when compared to a more specialized tool like Buffer.
Technical Support: Because TweetDeck is owned by Twitter technical support is rarely if ever needed. To get the most out of TweetDeck you might want to consider URL shortening integration as well as use a third-party plugin like Better TweetDeck to improve your user experience.
Requirements: TweetDeck is a free tool and a powerful one at that. To get started with TweetDeck the only thing you need is a Twitter account. To sign up or log into TweetDeck you only need your Twitter credentials.
Source: Bianca Libbon
Valuable Features: The most valuable feature by far is being able to add an unlimited amount of users to my Tweetdeck account. It helps that doing so is free, because my company and I highly value efficiency in spending -although I am not sure I know anyone who doesn’t.
Improvements to my organization: By having all of my Tweets available on one platform, it saves me countless hours of having to think of and Tweet on the spot, and therefore I am able to be more productive with my extra time. I can see the Tweets I have scheduled out for each client and triple check for spelling/grammar errors, which is a life and time saver.
Room for improvement: Let us edit our scheduled and posted Tweets! I currently have to delete (or Tweet and delete) my posts if there is an error in them or if I want to add/delete some aspect of it and that is somewhat of a pain. Not enough for me to not take the time to do it, but being able to edit would be appreciated.
Technical Support: Sometimes Tweetdeck doesn’t add my scheduled tweets to the Que so I always have to copy the Tweet before sending it out just in case the program acts up.
Initial Set Up: Set up is super easy to understand and from there on its super easy to manage!
Source: Arron Richmond
For us, the most valuable feature is Tweetdeck’s ability to very quickly, easily, and effectively search Twitter on a number of different subjects and display them all in individual columns. Our business offers a variety of training courses across a widely different spectrum, so to be able to see what’s happening on Twitter for a variety of different topics at once is incredibly beneficial.
This has allowed us to engage socially with influencers in each of these different subjects, which helps us became influencers ourselves. As e-Learning providers, our ability to display our knowledge credibly is important to our brand identity. Being easily able to find the discussions happening, Tweetdeck enables us to display this in a social environment that just using Twitter by itself would be very difficult to achieve.
We have never really encountered any massive technical problems with Tweetdeck and any we have encountered have resolved themselves quickly. It integrates seamlessly with your Twitter account (or accounts if you are utilizing multiple accounts). However, admittedly we only have one Twitter account on Tweetdeck at this moment.
Setting Tweetdeck up initially is very straightforward, definitely not as complex as other social media dashboards I have used in the past. One of the drawbacks of Tweetdeck is that, unlike Twitter’s own home feed, whilst you are able to implement a column for your ‘notifications’ to see when other users have engaged with you, it does not show engagements on other users’ Tweets that mention you. This means you could be missing social conversations that you do not know are happening because they are happening someone else’s Tweet, even though that Tweet could be entirely focused on you.
Source: Ian Wright
Valuable Features: Scheduling tweets into the future, manage multiple accounts with just one login, and quickly scan direct messages.
Improvements to my organization: Allows us to have an active twitter account, even when we’re not in the office, very clear interface to see what’s coming up, and frees up time for other more valuable tasks.
Room for improvement: It can sometimes be difficult to see all your upcoming tweets if you have a very large number of them, search function often brings back too much data to be useful, and editing upcoming tweets, especially those with attached images, is a pain, often just easier to delete and create a new tweet from scratch.
Technical Support: Never had an issue with it, but have not had to use it as it generally works as expected.
Initial Set Up: Could not be easier if you are already logged into twitter. Takes all of five minutes to get started.
Source Kristen Carvalho
Valuable Features: Tweetdeck is perfect for large or small companies. The features that I like from a social automation and monitoring standpoint are the multi-account feature, scheduling future posts and the link shortening. If you have multiple accounts for your organization the multi-account feature makes it so easy to do all your scheduling and monitoring in one place without logging out of accounts. In the event industry, this is great for organizations that host multiple events but don’t want to invest in a full social media automation platform. With the link shortener bitly option, you have the ability to track your link clicks and metrics. This is a real time saver.
From an organization standpoint/logistics perspective, I like the team function, analytics on posts, and the list functions. When you work with multiple people on a team, but don’t want to give away the password to make sure that errors don’t occur, the team function is perfect.
Improvements to my Organization: I will say that we do have a paid social media automation platform for our organization, but Tweetdeck is still the one I use daily for monitoring. One of the biggest improvements it gave my organization was the ability to act quickly if we get a support request via twitter or to answer to the community. You have the ability to allow pop-ups on your computer so you will be notified when a tweet comes to you. This is great because I do not have to dedicate an entire screen to tweet deck. I can have it on in the background and still are notified of the activity quickly and respond. It also allowed us to easier track our sales team when they are onsite. Without the lists or column function that allows you to follow hashtags and accounts we had to manually track each person’s account when onsite at an event. Now we can see it all on one screen and be able to retweet and post information from them quickly, without having to wait for them to send a note through email.
Technical Support: We haven’t had a need yet for any support with the platform. However, I will say that I have never seen a function to reach out if you were to have an issue. I believe you need to go directly to Twitter to do so.
Initial Setup: I have had Tweetdeck for 3 years now. When I first set it up it took some time figuring out how to get the columns correctly. For example, my companies name is etouches. In order to track all the conversation around us not just people who mention us I needed to create a column that tracked the name. However, as a result we also kept getting people who were just saying “touches” so I needed to make an exclusion of that word in order to get the information I wanted. I will say that when new people have come on board and I get them started on Tweetdeck, they are quick to pick up how to add new columns and switch back and forth between accounts.