Twitter, TweetDeck, and TweetChats, Oh My!

This post is going to be a little bit different than the others. It’s kind of a public service announcement to those who are part of the “Lead from Within” tweet chat family. To those of you who are not part of that family, stick with me. I’ll be back to my regular posts next Tuesday.

For the uninitiated the #leadfromwithin tweet chat takes place on Tuesday evenings at 8:00 Eastern and 5:00 Pacific time. Each chat covers a single topic centered around personal and business leadership. We’ve covered topics like communication, empathy, vision, setting boundaries, etc. I’ve been participating for a few months now and never fail to learn something new or be inspired to take action and better myself. I highly recommend it.

It’s easy to join, just go to http://tweetchat.com and log in using your twitter account. Type #leadfromwithin into the chat room box at the very top of the page and you’ll automatically be joined to the chat. As long you’re logged in to the site every tweet you send out will have the #leadfromwithin hash tag automatically appended to your tweet and all participants will see your tweet whether they follow you or not.

I’ll have more to say about #leadfromwithin in a future post, but for now I wanted to address a solution to a problem we experienced last Tuesday during the chat.

I don’t really know why, but last Tuesday the tweetchat.com site was extremely slow at updating the page and many participants missed questions and discussion because of it. This happens on rare occasions because of possible issues going on with Tweetchat.com or even with Twitter itself.

As a result I switched from Tweetchat.com to a software program called TweetDeck.

I won’t go into a lot of detail about this because my #leadfromwithin friend Chris Edmonds (@scedmonds) turned me on to a tutorial that covers everything you need to know to effectively use TweetDeck as an alternative to Tweetchat.com.

Here’s the link:

http://thedesktoptutor.com/blog/tools/tweetchat-too-slow-using-tweetdeck-as-a-work-around

Here’s another source of TweetDeck links that might be of interest:

http://support.tweetdeck.com/forums/126043-desktop-video-tutorials

Anyway, I thought I’d just let you know that TweetDeck is an awesome alternative when Tweetchat.com is having issues. It’s also a great tool to use for regular Tweeting as well.

Hope these links help, and I hope you all have a great weekend.

Regular posting resumes on Tuesday.