Tame Multiple Twitter Accounts

Many Twitter clients don’t support multiple accounts.  One of the ways I keep in touch with customers is through Twitter, so immediately I use two Twitter accounts regularly.  You might be in a similar position.

I quickly realised how awkward it is to manage multiple accounts: I’d forget to check one and subsequently get a backlog of @replies.  Getting an email for direct messages helps because they’re usually low-volume, but for general use emails are too frequent.

Twitterific and Twitterfox both support multiple accounts, but they don’t stream the accounts together or allow you to view them at the same time.  A lot of people use Twhirl over TweetDeck just because Twhirl offers multiple account support.

Beyond Twhirl, the best solutions I’ve found are all web-based.  I’ll write up some desktop/mobile ones in a follow-up, because there’s plenty of excellent iPhone apps that streamline several accounts.  The reason I’ve focused on web-based clients is it makes it easier for me to view them on multiple computers, be it office computers, home, netbook and iPhone.

HootSuite

There are web apps dedicated to solving this problem.  You have to be careful with web apps because they require you to share your password with their service, but it’s been rare that a case of password theft has happened this way.

HootSuite (formerly BrightKit) provides several features to make working with multiple accounts easier:

• RSS imports (i.e., your company blog straight into Twitter)
• View tweets, @replies and direct messages
• Schedule tweets
• Allow colleagues to login (they call them editors)
• Stats integration for links with their own URL shortener
• Possibility of ad revenue through their URL shortener

As you can see by the feature list, HootSuite is attempting to comprehensively support commercial use of Twitter.  The name change is also welcome: “hoot” makes more sense than BrightKit, I kept forgetting the name before and had to get into delicious to look for it.

Here’s what it looks like:

The Ultimate Technique: Personalised Homepages

Another solution is to use personal homepages.  Google’s personalised homepage has a Twitter gadget which is fully-featured.  The only problem is it doesn’t allow me to login twice.  Fortunately there’s two gadgets: Twitter Gadget and BeTwittered.  This allows you to show two accounts:

Netvibes

Netvibes is the best solution I’ve found so far.  If you think personalised homepages and widgets are old hat you should try it out:  you can set up a page without signing up, and then sign up later if you like it.

Here’s how to set up the ultimate Twitter panel in Netvibes:

1. Click “Add Content”, search for twitter
2. Add a Twitter widget of your choice, then click “edit” and enter your account details
3. Add as many as you like, across multiple tabs if that helps
4. Here’s the secret: there’s also a Twitter Search widget
5. Add a set of search widgets to keep track of important stuff, I did this so I could easily see @replies across accounts

Netvibes also allows you to add multiple Gmail accounts, and they work with Google Hosted email too!  Then there’s Facebook and Delicious support, so you can effectively create a great little social hub.

Although HootSuite has things like scheduled tweets, what I really need is to just see what’s going on quickly.  Netvibes smartly supports a variety of social networking tools, and the combination of Twitter clients and search makes it a great dashboard on your social web.