If you’re regularly active on Twitter for any length of time, you can quickly outgrow the standard way of using the service. By standard, I’m referring to the fact that Twitter provides a straightforward and easy to use web interface to update your status and send/receive direct messages. This method of using Twitter works but doesn’t scale efficiently. That is, as your tweet  volume and social interaction increases, the standard tools begin to degrade the exprience. They can require too much effort, cause you to miss important tweets, or make it difficult to follow conversation on specific topics or trends.

Time to enhance your experience by incorporating some Twitter power tools into the mix. While there are many of them out there, few are as important to me as Tweetdeck. According to the the website, Tweetdeck is:

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.

In simple terms, Tweetdeck is a program that becomes your window to Twitter. You interact with Twitter through Tweetdeck.

In my terms, Tweetdeck is the killer app for Twitter (translation: kicks ass!) Why? It makes Twitter more efficient. More productive. More manageable. It enables me to get MORE value out of twitter than I would otherwise be able to do.

With Tweetdeck I can:

Segment the people I follow into categories that make sense for me.

This is important. It dramatically reduces the signal to noise ratio, and gives me an unobstructed view into the people and topics that matter to me most. You can easily add/edit/remove people you follow to these categories with a single click. Here I add Scott Monty, someone I admire for the incredible work he is doing with social media at Ford, to the “Thought Leader” group I created.

Tweetdeck has a built in Twitter search feature as well. I use it to search & find topics that I want to monitor. Twitter search on the web is great, but Tweetdeck will continuously update as new tweets come in from the Twitter community. How is this useful? For starters, it’s probably one of the best ways to learn about and follow discussions about sessions at key conferences that are of interest to me, like SXSW, Forrester Consumer Forum, or Web 2.0 Expo. Most often these events are tracked on Twitter by using hashtags. Hashtags are a convention for grouping tweets together. They’re like tags on any blog, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag (thanks to Adam Cohen for originally showing me how to track hashtags)

Using Tweetdeck to create a live feed of an event by searching for hashtags isn’t quite the same as being there, but it does provide useful information and gives you the ability to interact with others that ARE attending. This commonly results in incredibly valuable backchannel discussion, often more interesting than the event itself.

Or for less professional interests, like my favorite hockey team: The Detroit Red Wings

Tweetdeck also shows replies and direct messages (sorry, no screenshot of these!) to you.

Another feature of Tweetdeck that I use regularly is the integrated URL shortening services. These are invaluable because Twitter limits messages to 140 characters. Tweetdeck’s URL shortening saves precious characters when you are including links in your tweet. Whether you prefer tinyurl, twurl, bit.ly, snipurl, or is.gd, Tweetdeck supports them all and more. I prefer using thurl, because it provides some analytics about the link, but that’s a topic for another post. You can use whichever URL shortener you prefer like so:

Tweetdeck does even more than I cover here. I encourage you to download it and give it a try. You’ll need to install the adobe AIR runtime environment before you’re able to install Tweetdeck. If you find yourself liking it, I’d also encourage you to support Tweetdeck’s creator, Iain Dodsworth, by donating a small amount to fund the project.

And if you’re having trouble with Tweetdeck, you’ll find plenty of answers at the customer feedback site.