Mini-Post (April 2021) - Using Tweetdeck for Freelancing
Clever use of Tweetdeck's services can make it easier to freelance, pitch, and stay on top of news.
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As I mentioned in one of the newsletters last month, Twitter is one of your greatest sources of opportunity and promotion, especially as a freelancer. But, as you follow more and more people, what is once a useful resource quickly becomes difficult to navigate. If you’re missing important things, Twitter kind of loses its purpose!
I use vanilla Twitter a lot, but I head to Tweetdeck if I need to do something work-related. It’s a bit of work, but if you set it up properly, you won’t have to worry about missed calls for pitches or seeing your colleague’s latest works.
The best way to do that? With lists. You probably forgot about those! Or didn’t remember they existed. But lists are pretty essential to Tweetdeck, and they make it possible to organize your users and get the information you need.
So, as an example, this is how I have my Tweetdeck columns set up:
For me, this is an ideal setup. I need to know scheduled tweets for both tweeting out deals from a work account and making sure my 100 Word Gaming tweets are scheduled and going out on time. Then I have a deals column for keeping track of the latest sales (as an e-commerce writer, that’s super important). Column three is for my colleagues, so I know when their works goes live and I can read it. Column four, Gaming News, is self-explanatory.
All but the first column are lists! Making a list in Tweetdeck and Twitter is easy… but since we’re talking about Tweetdeck, here’s how you make a list (and make it a new column at the same time!
From there, you can name your list whatever you like, make it public or private (I tend to make my lists private so people don’t get notified when I add them), and add the accounts you’d like to pull out from the jumble of the main feed.
As for who to add, that depends entirely on what your list is for! Don’t forget two things, however:
You can tweak your list at any time! Add or remove accounts whenever you need to to keep your list relevant and useful.
You do not have to follow someone in order to add them to a list! For me, this is a lifesaver—I don’t want deals and publications accounts mucking up my main feed when I’m not working. It helps a lot!
Make Tweetdeck work for you, and it’ll help you a lot with keeping track of the important stuff while filtering out some of the background noise.
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