Tim Brockman . com

Hootsuite 2.0, CoTweet, TweetDeck, Twitterrific 2.1

• Tim Brockman
• @ 1:20 am

Twitter is becoming a major interface for media giants, businesses of all sizes, celebrities, even wrestlers. If you want your company's account flexing its off shirts and grappling your audience into submission, these tools can help.

• HootSuite 2.0
• CoTweet
• TweetDeck
• Twitterrific 2.1

Twitterrific

In the cage-match of Twitter, Twitterrific is the squirrely lightweight somersaulting off the top rope solution that will keep 'em on the edge of their seats. It allows you to manage multiple accounts & searches, has both a Mac OS version and an amazing app for the iPhone/iTouch, plus it gives you plenty of settings to make it suit your work flow. They even have a bookmark feature for Safari on your iPhone making it easy to tweet as you browse. The people at The Iconfactory made the perfect solution for the solo user with multiple accounts. I've tried others out but, use this for my mobile solution.

Every big match can turn into a Battle Royal.

Need some beefy cohorts to jump in on your side? Time for an enterprise solution.

TweetDeck

When it comes to enterprise solutions TweetDeck is the defending tag team champion. It is a desktop based enterprise client that allows grouping, collaboration, multiple profiles, multiple users and a bunch of other cool stuff. SilverLight keeps it consistent and available for almost every platform imaginable and it has a pretty good iPhone app. Champions in the squared circle always have one thing in common... After a long dramatic match of getting hit beat down by folding chairs when the ref wasn't looking they get back up. TweetDeck gives you the power of miraculous recovery with easy back up and sync features.

CoTweet

A mob rushing the ring is one thing but, if you want a well orchestrated tag team match CoTweet is built to take care of business. If your enterprise plans to use twitter as a point of contact for any type of sales or support you know the importance of follow-up. It is a web based application allowing multiple users to take different roles in multiple accounts. It has an email-ish interface adding the intuitive factor for direct messages. It incorporates all of the key features you would expect but it's major strength is the archiving, notification, and follow-up system. You can delegate direct messages for others in your organization to follow up on, or notify them when it is their time to be 'on duty'.

HootSuite 2.0

HootSuite recently released version 2.0 (beta), and seems to be stepping up to meet the challenges of large enterprises a bit better. It has support for multiple users and multiple accounts, as well as the filtering and search features of the above clients. It has notifications but much less robust in this arena than CoTweet... unless you factor in Toucan and Salesforce CRM. However the easily integrated XML feeds may make this more attractive to the Development/Design department building/deploying the enterprise's Web/SN presence. It also has one other major distinction from other contenders, OW.LY! If you aren't familiar with ow.ly it is a url shortener like bit.ly but, with the addition of a toolbar included in the redirect page that invites social networking buffs to share via add this. Wait, go back to Toucan and Salesforce... HootSuite and Touchan became friends, so now you can integrate Toucan the official Twitter client of Salesforce CRM (the one you use from within Salesforce) can now import all of your profile stuff from HootSuite. So in the end the builders get the easy XML feed integration, the spamarketing folks get to resurrect the word Viral (and have it apply to what they're talking about) with the add this toolbar from ow.ly, and the sales team get to keep using Salesforce and Toucan (they would have anyway). This is the kind of recipe that builds to future market dominance.

This is still pretty early in the game and most of the big solutions are still pretty beta-ish. With these tools there's still room for growth. In another year of development the features will probably blossom to meet the Twitter battle royal. If you use these or other tools for Twitter and have an opinion let me know.