Sanders Media

Today, I wanted to go over some of the various Twitter clients. Whether you use Windows, Mac or Linux, there is one for you.

1. Nambu: This is my personal favorite. However, it is Mac only. It sports a very clean interface, and almost has the look of Apple’s Mail application. It’s very easy to use, and it’s free.
2. TweetDeck: A few of my Windows friends like this one a lot. It is available in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux versions. It sports some handy features including spam protection and Facebook updates. It’s also free.
3. Twitterrific: This client has two versions: free and paid. The free version is fully functional, but is ad supported. It is Mac only. The iPhone version is one of the App Store’s top Twitter related downloads.
4. Twhirl: This is another popular Twitter client. It is available for Mac OS X and Windows. It has some great features including English spell check and image posting.
5. TwitterFox: This is more of a plugin than a client, but it bears mentioning. It is platform agnostic because it is a plugin for the Firefox web browser. It displays a small icon near your status bar that tells you when there are new tweets to your account.

If you’re a Mac user, I would definitely give Nambu a try. Windows and Linux users should look into TweetDeck. Because of TweetDeck’s Facebook inclusion, I may eventually switch over. Since many of us are on multiple social networking services, this becomes increasingly useful.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about Twitter lately. Here are some basics about the popular social network.

• Tweet: This is the act of posting to Twitter. A post is a Tweet.
• Retweet: This involves posting or quoting another tweet in your own post.
• Follow: This is where you follow other users feeds or “tweets”.
• @user: This is your address on Twitter. For instance, to contact me on Twitter, simply send a message to @sandersmedia.
• Twitter Client: While you can follow your Twitter feed on Twitter.com, many people use a Twitter client. It’s like Outlook for your Twitter account.
• Short URL: You are able to post links in your tweets. However, since you are only allowed 140 characters for each “tweet”, you’ll want to shorten the URL. Tinyurl.com is an example of a service that will do this for you.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. You can also Google “twitter basics”.

Wikipedia defines RSS as (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication”) a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. In this day of constant status updates, the RSS feed can be used to spread your message across multiple platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) quickly.

My first introduction to the concept of RSS came from my use of Google Reader to pull all of the content I wanted to read into one place. I could check the sports pages, world news and weather in one place. I now use RSS to feed this blog to Facebook. Twitterfeed uses my RSS to post links to this blog on Twitter.

I have a client who uses a template service for her website. She posts quite a bit to the blog portion of her site, but the template service does not provide an RSS feed for the blog. This makes it impossible to effectively spread her posts across multiple platforms. Due to SEO concerns, she can’t simply re-post in each place.

Make sure your website has an RSS feed. It will improve your branding, and spread your message.