The Benefits of Third-Party Twitter Clients

Why should you consider switching over from using twitter’s original webpage to a third-party client? There are many benefits of using an outside application, with reasons across the board from functionality, navigation, and maximizing the time you spend on social media. This post will be especially beneficial for small businesses and entrepreneurs who have recently started using twitter, but haven’t explored their options outside of twitter’s native homepage.

The Limits of Twitter

The twitter homepage is where most of us start, after signing up for an account and fiddling with our profile options. It’s no surprise that a majority of tweets are still sent through twitter.com. When I first started my tweeting ‘career,’ the homepage was my only stop to checking out new followers and posting updates.

For me, however, twitter quickly became all about interactions and relationship-building. As my followers grew, it became increasingly difficult to monitor followers and keep up to date with the sheer amount of information being sent my way. Here, I think, is the biggest limitation of twitter.com’s interface – it’s a single column which quickly fills up with feeds from every single one of your followers. While the @replies and Direct Message filters were initially useful, in my case, it wasn’t an effective way of maximizing the time I was spending on social media.

I see twitter.com as a great way of tweeting on the go when you don’t have access to your client of choice. The new introduction of twitter lists can help in organization; as an added plus, it’s a great way of permanently recommending quality followers for others to see.

Third-Party Twitter Clients: Organization, Tracking & Search

Even with twitter’s new site enhancements, there are still important reasons as to why small businesses should consider a third-party twitter client.

Personable Organization – Many clients offer a way to group your followers into separate categories. While this may be daunting to initially set up, it’s time well spent. Instead of viewing an overwhelming amount of unfiltered tweets, you can create custom groups of any category imaginable. You may want to group your tweets on location, interests, coworkers, leads… the possibilities of how you want to organize your followers are truly endless. There will be a single constant to all of this madness: in creating categories, your ‘dashboard’ will always be personal, neat, and relatively easier to read. The more followers you get, the more important your predetermined categories will be.

Improved Tracking – Small businesses are on twitter for a reason, whether it’s brand recognition, customer service, or lead generation. Frequently, it’s a combination of all three. Engaging your followers also means that you need to keep on top of connections that you’re making on behalf of your business. Similar to networking in person, there’s an element of followup which is crucial to maintaining good rapport with your customers, partners, and potential future business. A third-party client may have notifications whenever anyone replies to you (which can also be counterproductive!). Some of the more advanced platforms, such as Hootsuite, boast simplified statistics that will help you exhibit your social media ROI to your partners and board. Most third-party clients, at the very minimum, will have a URL shortening device built in. Some of the most popular shortening websites, such as bit.ly or digg, will have their own tracking metrics for when anyone clicks on links that you shortened using their service.

Search Functionality – Closely tied to Tracking, what social media users are saying about your company online is of paramount importance to your brand and reputation. The mark of a stellar third-party client is their improved search options. Instead of searching once for your company’s name or product line, make this a permanent fixture of your display. On a similar vein, if your company provides a solution to a specific problem, then it’s a great idea to create searches for these terms and engage new customers – ones that will be sure to appreciate your company’s level of service.

Above are just some ideas to get you started on searching for the right third-party client for your business. This post is intended to apply across all the various platforms and services but it may be slightly skewed to the functions of the clients that I’m familiar with. For desktop clients, I use the PC versions of Hootsuite and Tweetdeck; on a mobile platform, it’s Tweetdeck for the iPhone and Tweetie. My main premise here wasn’t to compare and contrast third-party clients, but to provide reasons as to why businesses should strongly consider using one. There are many articles written on analyzing different twitter clients – the list on twitter.com is a great starting point.

Do you have a Mac? A Blackberry or Android? I’d be curious to see what third-party clients on other platforms look like. Please Get in touch or drop me a comment. Finally, if you’re new to social media, check out some of these great resources below:

Building Trusting Relationships Through Social Media
Social Media for Small Businesses
Tips for Successful Social Media Time Management