tweetdeck – Information Maven

Ever find some information you’d love to tweet? And then another? And then another? You know you shouldn’t really be posting these all at the same time, but scheduling that tweet to hit at a particular time is a pain. This is the exact problem that Timely (http://timely.is) tries to solve, and does so quite well. I’ve made Timely part of my productivity tool kit.

Timely allows me to bookmark tweets for later publication (very easily) and to do that for multiple accounts at a time. The coolest part? It picks when to publish those tweets, favoring weekdays and high-traffic times of the day. This process is painless and makes it possible for me to take a few minutes at the beginning of my week and schedule 1, 3, or 5 tweets per day for the rest of my week. Timely allows me to spend more of my time on the things that matter, not just publishing tweets.

So, why use this over any other scheduling feature like CoTweet (http://cotweet.com) or Tweetdeck (http://tweetdeck.com)? I don’t – Timely fills my need for scheduling, CoTweet for notification of mentions, and Tweetdeck for everyday posting. Timely is from the folks at Flowtown (http://www.flowtown.com) and their care for user experience and ease of use shows. I’d recommend Timely for anyone who’d like to delegate the task of “when should I publish that tweet.” And – as a bonus – they have statistics on the results of those tweets as well, letting you know which tweets garnered the most clicks, retweets, and reach.

CNN reported this week that Twitter subscriber growth had peaked and that visits to the site were relatively flat. This information doesn’t seem to match the reports from Twitter itself that the number of tweets per day keep growing and that the engagement of users has increased.

What else could be going on here? A key component of Twitter’s growth is in the mobile and client space — people accessing the service through smartphones and using clients such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic to access the Twitter API — and these users may not show up directly.

Mobile internet growth has not yet peaked (Apple has sold 42m iPhones on a 1 billion+ base of all mobile phone users, e.g) and only about a quarter of internet users use mobile internet services. Clearly, major growth is still to come for real-time services and the Internet — it just might not happen on the web browser but through other clients. Twitterific or Tweetie might appeal to users of the new Apple Tablet — and there are surely other devices to come.

So what’s CNN’s motivation for calling a peak on Twitter? First, Twitter’s a threat to the core CNN business, offering real-time news faster and (potentially) more accurate than the CNN reporting itself. MSNBC recently purchased the @breakingnews twitter handle and it is now an arms race to deliver a mix of curated crowdsourcing, breaking news, and expert opinion to be a news organization today. It would be great if CNN would respond to this challenge by offering better content in every news channel (mobile, web, tv, etc.) … let’s hope it happens.

Tag: tweetdeck

Has Twitter Subscriber Growth Peaked?

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: