Last night the CIPR Social Summer series hosted a session on all things TweetDeck. If you haven't tried TweetDeck, try it now. It's free!
According to Twitstat.com today, after simply tweeting at twitter.com, Tweetdeck is the most popular Twitter client globally. Here's the stats I just grabbed from Twitstat:
| Rank | Client | % of users | Tweets/user | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | (1) | web | 16.80 % | 2.90 |
| 2 | (2) | TweetDeck | 9.50 % | 3.17 |
| 3 | (6) | twitterfeed | 5.90 % | 5.58 |
| 4 | (3) | foursquare | 5.85 % | 1.49 |
| 5 | (4) | Twitter for iPhone | 5.85 % | 2.38 |
| 6 | (5) | HootSuite | 5.39 % | 2.68 |
| 7 | (8) | Echofon | 3.22 % | 3.25 |
| 8 | (25) | API | 2.76 % | 6.66 |
| 9 | (7) | Tweetie for Mac | 2.55 % | 2.38 |
| 10 | (9) | Seesmic | 2.16 % | 3.02 |
But TweetDeck is more than a nice way to shepherd incoming tweets and craft your own. TweetDeck is rapidly becoming the most powerful way to manage your social networking without ever having to log onto each and every social network yourself. It aggregates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and Foursquare, and it even lets you watch YouTube videos brought to your attention by your social network in situ.
So I was particularly delighted when TweetDeck MD Iain Dodsworth (@iaindodsworth) accepted our invitation to join us for one of our sessions to share his insights and answer our questions.
If I was to try to explain the success Iain and his team have experienced to date in one sentence it's this: unswerving focus on the user experience. And here's one of those acid tests usability experts emphasise... can the application be wielded as easily by a newbie who doesn't yet need the powerful bells and whistles as the social networking pro who does? The answer is yes, TweetDeck achieves this with aplomb.
Iain comes from the financial world where he developed ways to display market information to traders and their ilk, an environment where data visualisation is critical in facilitating great and very timely decision making based on masses and masses of real-time data. That now sounds like a very familiar environment to public relations pros staring down the social media firehose!
Currently available on PC and Mac, and for iPhone and iPad, the Android (a new mobile operating system, and the fastest growing one this year) community is awaiting TweetDeck for Android, and Iain was good enough to demo the nearly finished app to me and Wolfstar's Stuart Bruce. Ooooh, it's lovely, but Iain asked that I don't take the wind out of their sails just yet and tell you why it's 'oooooh lovely' exactly.
If you're busy trying to keep up with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, get TweetDeck now.
If you're trying to keep up with different conversations and different groups of people on any one of these, get TweetDeck now.
If you're a social analytics vendor looking to extend the monitoring functionality of your service into the workflow side of things, get in touch. I'd like to get you and Iain in a room and tease out some interesting opportunities together.
