The TweetDeck Desktop Twitter client is popular among social networking enthusiasts because it adds features above and beyond those of the Twitter Website. Now the company is extending some of that functionality to smartphone users with the TweetDeck Android app. You can monitor and post to multiple Twitter accounts from a single dashboard–and you can add your Google Buzz, Foursquare, or Facebook account.
If you already use TweetDeck Desktop, you can log in and start using the Android app right away. Unlike the Desktop version, however, the Android app doesn’t support LinkedIn or MySpace, so you won’t see those accounts.
You can add Twitter accounts and your Facebook account in-app. TweetDeck does not let you maintain Facebook Fan Pages or multiple Facebook accounts (the similar HootSuite app does), but it supports the Facebook (and Twitter and Foursquare) Location feature. You can post updates, links, and photos to your Facebook profile; view and comment on your News Feed; and open links in the Android Web browser.
You can post status updates to all of your configured accounts simultaneously, or you can select just one or two. Buttons in the Compose window let you attach a photo (video is not supported) from the Camera app or the Gallery app. You can choose between yFrog and Twitpic as your image host; the one you select will also handle Facebook posts.
If you multipost an image, the image link in all of the posts will associate with the Twitter account that you designate as your default. That could pose a problem if you want to keep your Twitter accounts separate (as I do). To choose your default account, selectMenu, Accounts and long-press the one you want to use.
To share Web page links from the Android Web browser, choose Menu, Share, TweetDeck. This series of options opens TweetDeck in Compose mode with the link prefilled. You can shorten the link by using bit.ly if you want.
Navigating the app is simple. Information is displayed in columns. Swipe the screen up or down to navigate within a column; swipe the screen sideways to move to another column. By default, you get a separate news feed column for each social network account, plus one column that provides an aggregated view of all the news feeds. You can easily add other column views such as Direct Messages and Mentions, and you can delete columns when you don’t want them anymore.
Overall, TweetDeck is a very slick, visually appealing app with a lot of useful features. I wish that it also supported Facebook Pages and LinkedIn accounts, and color-coding for each social media account’s columns would be helpful. This app is still fairly new, so I expect future updates to improve on the current version.
But even as-is, TweetDeck wins my vote over the official Twitter and Facebook apps.
If you know of a perfect social media management app, contact Brent W. Hopkins on Facebook or on Twitter as @brentwhopkins.
Check out other articles by Brent W. Hopkins.