Newbie Tuesday: 2 Apps That Make Twitter Easier AND Save Time!

I gave a presentation recently where a questioner asked, "When people are following hundreds of people on Twitter, how the heck do they have time to see all those messages? How can they possibly read them all?"

The short answer is, they don't read all those messages. Who could?

When you sign on to your Twitter account, you'll see the current and most recent tweets immediately. You can choose to scroll back and see older messages, if you have the time and inclination.

Tweet Management is what's called for, and the tool to do it is called a desktop manager. The 2 most popular are Tweetdeck and Seesmic. And luck-luck-lucky you, they have each just released new versions that will simplify your social networking and perhaps be the key to getting you to actually enjoy this stuff. Both programs are free downloads.

Here's the #1 difference between these programs and basic twitter.com: Instead of a single column of messages, you'll create up to 10 columns side by side. Separate columns for Direct Messages and tweets from Friends & People You Know Well will increase your chances of seeing "important" tweets without flipping back-and-forth from screen to screen.

What other categories do you need to create?

Are you a foodie who follows local restaurants and famous chefs? Put them into a column. Perhaps you want to aggregate Media -- everything from @Nightline and @nytimes to your local newspaper or TV news. Or put all of your celebs in a column together. Might be the only way to hook up @GlennBeck and @Maddow on the same screen.

What business are you in? A graphic designer might want to follow all of her local competitors as well as the national or international industry rockstars. You get the idea.

Tweetdeck and Seesmic will also make it easy for you to retweet someone else's message, reply or send a direct message without leaving the main screen. If you haven't been using twitter.com. you can't imagine what a big timesaver this is.

Also from the main screen you can search for other people, see their profile and follow them (or unfollow them) as you choose. Again: timesaver!

Another thought: consider making a column to easily follow your favorite hashtag. Twitter users attach a tag with a hashmark in front of it -- #OprahShow, for example -- to make it easy to monitor tweets on a given subject. Whether it's in your Seesmic column, or on a site like Tweetgrid, you'll see every single tweet about today's episode of Oprah as long as the hashmark is included.

Hashmarks really come in handy for events. #Emmys or #Inauguration09 are easy to figure out. Perhaps you've attended a conference where the event hashtag is announced from the stage. That's so that any attendees on Twitter can see what others are saying, and the people back at the office can catch the conference's key points, too.

After you read this post, send a tweet with the #NewbieTues hashtag. I'll be watching for you!

But wait! There's more!

One of the things that really made Twitter what it is today is the ability to attach links to messages. If it weren't for URL-shortening sites like tinyURL and bit.ly, there's no way that most URL's would ever make it under the 140-character limit. Unfortunately, using your browser at Twitter.com makes attaching a URL a pain. Leave twitter, go to the shortening site, enter the long URL, copy the shortened one, return to twitter, paste the shortened link. Whew.

With a desktop manager, URL-shortening is built in! Paste the URL and poof! it's reduced to about 20 characters or less and already in place for sending.

But here's what may be the most helpful aspect of Tweetdeck or Seesmic: on either program, you can update your Facebook status (and monitor all of your Facebook friends' status) in addition to your Twitter messenging. (Tweetdeck will let you update your MySpace page, too.)

Yay. Yay. Yay.

Here's my confession: I love Twitter, I like Facebook, but I only update LinkedIn when I can. So shoot me.

I'm on Twitter every day, and maybe I go to Facebook every 2 days or so. As a result, I've had people ask me, "Don't you ever check your Facebook page?" That's not good for the Goddess' rep, ya know? But now I can stay current on Facebook just as easily as I do on Twitter. Heck, maybe I can use the time I save to be more up-to-date on Linked In! What will you do with your saved time?