Blogging and Tweeting – Part Three

Twitter is not just confined to the service’s official website. Many people are shocked when they find out about the hundreds of desktop and mobile clients, for almost every platform, especially dedicated to enhancing your Twitter experience. What’s this got to do with improving your blogging potential via the infamous social networking website? Using a desktop client can help you to move through tasks swiftly and to cut out some of the steps in the process of posting a link to a blog post. For example…

URL shortening. Twitter used to automatically shorten URLs but a close friend of mine complained regarding this leading to security issues as well as better chances of malware bots surviving, so the feature was discarded. Now we’re supposed to use a whole different website just to make a web address smaller. Even when Twitter did automatically shorten addresses it was a bit edgy. In desktop clients URLs will automatically shorten themselves via a preset URL-shortening service as soon as you paste it into the application’s tweet composition area. Admittedly, this cuts out the possibility of customizing your shortened URL. But not many people do that anymore anyway, and it cuts out a lot of manual work.

Twitter mobile clients are also helpful for blogging. If you’re the proud owner of a smartphone such as the iPhone or something similar, you may be accustomed to mobile blogging. Why not get into mobile tweeting as well? There are a lot of reasons why you should.

First of all, you won’t need to rely on finding a computer at the dire moment when your boss calls you and asks you to update the company blog.(If you’re a personal blogger it may be the wife asking you to upload those baby pictures pronto or no fun in the bedroom tonight). Instead, you can just whip out your phone, write the blog, and then tweet the link directly from wherever you may be in the world. Of course, blogging on a mobile isn’t as commonplace because typing several pages on a phone isn’t fun.

Secondly, tweeting from your phone can save your pocket from getting lighter if you have the right allowance, contacts and whatnot. Perhaps you’re on a contact which forces you to pay for texts but Internet allowance is completely free. Or maybe you’re trying to contact a friend who’s on Twitter but doesn’t have any credit. Twitter Mobile will bridge the gap of communication. On a slightly unrelated note I have a friend, Joe Davison, who used to be stubbornly reluctant to join Facebook. When he finally did sign up I enquired as to why he’d changed his mind so seemingly suddenly. ‘I realised Facebook messaging instead of texting was saving me a hell of a lot of credit’.

Last but not least, mobile tweeting is one of the best ways to stay in the loop and get news updates directly from where you may be standing or sitting right this second. I was on a bus in the downtown district when I found out Michael Jackson had died, all thanks to Twitter.

Desktop clients will revolutionize the way you use Twitter on your PC or Mac, while mobile clients will aid to bridge gaps in communication and keeps you in the loop. So what’s stopping you from trying them out and feeling the results within the space of a minute?
This concludes my three-part post on using Twitter to maximize your blogging potential. Soon I’ll be posting a step-by-step guide to coupling Blogger with Twitter so that all blog posts are automatically referred to in robotically-generated tweets. That could act as a sort of spin-off I suppose.
To download TweetDeck, click here.