Twitter has become an effective social media tool for businesses both large and small. It helps companies engage and educate consumers, build joint ventures and develop valuable social connections. It’s a powerful tool for building brand awareness and promoting your services and products.

But it can be time-consuming to keep up with company tweets, especially if you have more than one account. Twitter — and its companion product, TweetDeck - can help here. Using them, you can share the posting and monitoring responsibilities with staff and easily manage multiple accounts.

Multiple accounts and users, though, can lead to confusion. Unanswered or repeat tweets or DMs equal poor customer service. Worse, they make your business look less than professional. So by using the tools that Twitter and TweetDeck provide, you solve numerous Twitter-related problems by improving time management, customer relations and scheduling.

Selective use

Within your Twitter account profile, you can designate trusted individuals as Contributors (if your business has been given access to this new feature; it’s being rolled out slowly). These staff members can contribute tweets, but they can’t access administrative features such as altering the profile and settings.

Twitter has also added the ability to switch among accounts easily via a drop-down menu, which accelerates the tweeting process for companies that host more than one account.

TweetDeck

Twitter’s TweetDeck application was designed to help you manage multiple accounts. You can set up vertical columns, each displaying a specific real-time feed (tweets from various accounts, timelines, mentions, DMs, trends, Facebook updates, etc.) and monitor them simultaneously. You can also schedule tweets to go out on a specific date/time, a feature that business users will especially appreciate, since it makes it easier to work ahead on marketing campaigns and announcements.

If your business maintains multiple Twitter accounts, or if you simply want to be able to toggle among personal and company feeds, Twitter and its companion application TweetDeck can save you time, improve your customer service response time, and help you better manage promotional tweets.