How I deal with multiple Twitter accounts.

You may have read in last week's General Musings post that I have split the streams of my Twitter account and now have two Twitter profiles (@Gaz4695 for my business tweets and @TheRealGaryC for non-business ones).

I debated about whether to do this for a while and finally decided to do it for two reasons:

1) I was identifying a lot of good stuff to tweet to followers that was not related to BPM and would, therefore, pollute my @Gaz4695 Twitter stream

2) I found a great tool to help me deal with managing this.

Back in the dim and distant past when Twitter was still young (about 18 months ago) There was no way to deal with managing two separate Twitter accounts without physically signing off your Twitter client and signing on as your other user.

As Twitter clients have become more and more sophisticated they have become able to deal with multiple accounts - some better than others. The perfect client as arrived - in my opinion - in the shape of Hootsuite.

I use Hootsuite on the iPhone and it has all the functionality you would expect from a full-featured Twitter client - retweets, search capabilities, geo-tagging etc. But what it also does really well is permit me to run multiple accounts simultaneously. What this does is gives me the ability to read a tweet in one Twitter stream and retweet it as a different user (or more than one user) instantly.

This is an incredibly useful function because at the moment I am following almost 1000 people on my @Gaz4695 account. These users will generally send a large amount of good links and comments in a day. I can look at any of these tweets and - using the retweet function - I can elect to send those to my @TheRealGaryC Twitter stream or to my Facebook page, or to both.

It works imply by providing an icon for each profile at the top of the screen and - by clicking on which icon you wish to send it to - you can select the accounts you require. There is no duplication of effort or dual entry. Just select your tweet, click the appropriate icons and go.

Simple.

If you are having trouble with managing multiple accounts then please give Hootsuite a look. Personally I'm not too enamoured of their web client but their iPhone (and iPad) version is fabulous.