When participating in a Twitter chat, you may use the Twitter.com from a computer or laptop. However, many people prefer to use a Twitter "client" app like Tweetdeck. TweetDeck is one of the most popular desktop Twitter client because of its ability to add extra columns makes it easy to filter and keep up with conversations using the columns.

The other benefits of TweetDeck is it allows you to manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, using your TweetDeck account, and synchronize your configuration when you use TweetDeck on different computers and mobile devices. No need to reset up your columns of @, searches, inbox, hashtags, lists and so on again!

TweetDeck

To get started with TweetDeck you just need to:

1. Go to http://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ or install the desktop version of TweetDeck .

2. Launch TweetDeck and sign in with your Twitter account.

Use a twitter account that isn’t shared with other people.
Once you have signed in, you can connect multiple Twitter accounts to your TweetDeck account.

3. Below is a summary of the main features of TweetDeck.

Summary of TweetDeck menu:

TweetDeck menu

4. Just click Compose a tweet icon to write your tweet.

Compose a tweet

5 Here’s a quick overview of what each icon on a tweet does.

Icons on a tweet

Clicking on the More icon reveals other options.

Under the more option

6. You can move a column, customize, change alerts and delete columns by click on the down down arrow on a column.

TweetDeck Column Settings

Monitoring hashtags using TweetDeck columns is as easy as:

1. Add your hashtag term to the search box in TweetDeck and press Enter.

Adding a search column for a hashtag

2. When the search window loads click on Add Column.

Click on Add Column

3. Your search column will load in TweetDeck and all tweets using that hashtag will be updated as they’re tweeted.

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Content on this page is adapted from a blog post written by Sue Waters, of Edublogs. It is shared here under a CC-BY 4.0 (Links to an external site.) license

Image credit: Why you should begin your own PLN by Ashley Azzopardi (@ashleyazzopardi)