Have you ever worked with a team of different people, all of you needing access to the same Twitter account (representing an organization or project you all work on) at different times? Of course, the intuitive thing to do is to share the password to the account, and to all be logged on to it. However, this is not optimal for several reasons:
If you are like me in a different country from your collaborators (most of mine are in North America), Twitter gets suspicious and will put you through hoops to get logged in (hoops that require the original Twitter account creator to send you some information texted to them, or such)
If other Tweeters won’t be using the account on a daily basis, you may prefer to only allow them access to the account for a limited amount of time
Most people don’t want to constantly receive notifications for multiple Twitter accounts on their mobile devices (although I personally tolerate it with around 8 accounts, it sometimes means I make mistakes of responding from the wrong account if I am not concentrating).
Recently, one of the multinational teams I work on (Virtually Connecting) grew, and different people needed access to the Twitter account on different days across different timezones. We experimented with two options for sharing the use of the Twitter account without sharing out the password. I thought I would share a quick review of GroupTweet and TweetDeckTeams. (disclaimer: I had several email exchanges with someone from GroupTweet).
GroupTweet
GroupTweet allows you to give a team access to using your team’s Twitter account; each person could Tweet from the account in any of the following ways:
Using a particular link, tweet from there (this link also allows you to view the tweets the account has posted before)
Using your personal account, and send a tweet with @mention the Twitter handle in your tweet. The problem with this option is that it takes up the space of the Twitter handle (less space for your own text) then removes the @mention in the Tweet that comes out of the team account (which, depending on context, can change the meaning of the tweet)
Agreeing together on a hashtag and anyone from an authorized account can tweet to that hashtag to get the message tweeted as if it is from the account. This option’s problem is that the hashtag itself takes up characters and that’s less space for your own text
You allow DM to the Twitter account to be converted to a tweet. This is good except you never know when you might actually want to DM the account - and then you would get into trouble if that tweet ended up being public, wouldn’t you?
All of the options above also add a “via @YourAccount” at the end of the Tweet - taking up even more space in the 140 characters, and producing notifications for you each time. This annoyed my collaborators no end. However, I discovered later that we could change the “template” to remove this “via” part altogether.
My main criticism of GroupTweet is that it is not free for long. It is only free for a 30-day trial, after which you have to choose one of their pricing schemes (or go free with advertising if you have a huge number of followers; even if we had that number of followers I would be wary of the advertising, to be honest). The main advantage of it is its simplicity to use - once you set it up, you can use it quite easily from your own account on any device. This last one is important as I discuss the other option we explored (and ultimately agreed to use: Tweetdeck Teams)
TweetDeck Teams
TweetDeck teams is really simple to use - if you use TweetDeck. Basically, all you have to do as the administrator of the Twitter team account is to “authorize” other users to Tweet as if they are the team account. Once they accept, each time they send a tweet (from TweetDeck), they will be able to choose whether to tweet from their personal account or the team account, or both. You can give team members “admin” or “contributor” access. Contributors can tweet, schedule tweets, and follow/unfollow others, as well as create lists. They can also retweet/fave (which you can’t do from GroupTweet) tweets. They cannot add or remove team members or use the account outside Tweetdeck. Admins on the team who don’t have the actual account password can add/remove members to the team, but they cannot access the account outside TweetDeck.
The obvious downside of TweetDeck Teams is… you have to use TweetDeck. For our purposes on virtually connecting, where the person using the Twitter account usually needs to be on a computer anyway doing other things, it’s convenient, especially with the scheduling options. The other upside of TweetDeck teams, for me at least, is that it is free. And in most situations involving social media and voluntary work, free trumps everything.
I still haven’t figured out if either one allows team members to use the account for direct messages with others, but it’s not an urgent need for us just yet. For me, it comes down to this: are you willing to pay? Or are you willing to ask team members to sit in front of a computer? I’m going for the computer.
What have you been doing when collaborating on a Twitter (or other) account with large group of people?
flickr photo Multiple Tweets Plain shared by mkhmarketing under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license
