How To Use CoTweet To Join The Conversation
by David Turnbull – Follow him @dturnbull
Why use CoTweet.com?
• Integrated monitoring and response. By going to cotweet.com/search (after signing up) you can monitor any keyword you wish in a column-based interface. What’s particularly brilliant though is that you can quickly reply to tweets and are given plenty of options including an integrated URL shortener and the ability to schedule your responses.
• Fast and sleek interface. The problem I’ve found with most desktop applications like TweetDeck is they run fairly slow and consume large amounts of resources (mainly at the fault of Adobe Air I believe). CoTweet on the other hand is surprisingly fast and has a sleek Mac-like interface. It looks good but is not overpowering either; a good balance between aesthetics and usability.
• Support for multiple accounts. Many bloggers have multiple Twitter accounts to either differentiate between business and personal or for different projects. CoTweet handles multiple accounts beautifully making it easy for solopreneurs to connect with a range of markets and larger companies to widen their Twitter presence.
• Suitable for teams. For some this’ll be the killer feature. To my knowledge CoTweet is the only Twitter tool that allows multiple users to have access to the same account and assign different tweets to those users. Very useful if you’re a larger company with multiple staff managing the Twitter account, or if you’re running your business as a partnership.
• Gives you all the information you need. Simply click on the username of a Twitterer and a sidebar slides out with every detail about that user, a button to quickly follow that user and also access to past conversations you’ve had with them.
How to use CoTweet.com Effectively
1. Understand search filters. Twitter has quite powerful search filters that most people don’t make use of. Since CoTweet uses Twitter’s API, these same filters apply. A previous guest post on TwiTip covers 7 ways to use Twitter search, so that’s a good starting point. The simplest way to make use of search filters when using CoTweet is to add the line “-from: YOURUSERNAME -RT” (without the quotes) whenever you want to track a certain phrase. This hides your own tweets from and stops re-tweeted content from showing up to prevent duplication.
2. Monitor beyond your brand. Monitoring your own brand is certainly important but will unlikely give your exposure beyond your current boundaries. Consider monitoring:
• Hash tags. Jump into the conversation beyond specific mentions of products.
• Names (and Twitter usernames) of industry figures. One thing I do is monitor tweets that mention @tferriss because I know people interested in Tim might be interested in my site, and this gives me a chance to connect with them.
• Other brands. See how the conversation is flowing around your competitors. If you start seeing trends (like, dislikes etc) you can work them into your overall strategy. Twitter’s search is essentially free market research.
3. Embrace every connection. No connection is worth more or less than any other connection. Reply to and connect with as many people as humanly possible. This may not be effective time-wise, but surprisingly strong bonds can be built in less than 140 characters.
4. Track results with bit.ly. By going to the Integrations tab under Settings you can connect your bit.ly accont to CoTweet. Whenever you use CoTweet to tweet a link you’ll be able to track the number of clicks it gets via the bit.ly interface. This is great for gauging interest in content you share so you can accurately tailor your tweets to your audience.
5. Read the official documentation. There’s plenty of features built in to CoTweet and for some it may be a tad overwhelming (especially those working at larger companies who have a bad case of inertia). Luckily they realised that and there’s plenty of detailed documentation.
From the Darrell Rouse "TwitTip" Blog
Original Article (with links) Location:
http://www.twitip.com/how-to-use-cotweet-to-join-the-conversation/
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I've not tried CoTweet as yet and have long since given up trying every new twitter app that comes along.
This one though, sounds like tweetdeck without the memory hog in residence. I may give it a trial run soon.
Has anyone else tried it?
Eileen :D
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