How I work: managing multiple Twitter accounts

Text by: Jo

The 2016 OCLC Asia Pacific Regional Council Meeting is this week, and as I usually do at these types of events, I will be tweeting! I will be tweeting from both my personal profile and the HKLC profile. With this event on the horizon I thought now might be a good time to share what Twitter tools and clients I have tried in an effort to make sharing content across two profiles more efficient.

My current tweeting setup: Hootsuite + Twitter lists

For me, using Twitter is mostly a professional exercise. However I do use it to follow some news, travel and cooking sites that are not related to work. To create some separation between uses, I rely on Twitter lists. I have a number of lists: libraries, news, fun stuff, travel, and so on, and I also have a few search lists that pick up any tweets that use specific hashtags or words (e.g.: tweets containing the words Hong Kong Libraries). These search lists basically function like news alerts, and allow me to keep up to date with my chosen topics.

I combine my twitter lists with Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social media manager that allows you to view and schedule content to multiple accounts across multiple platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn etc). The free Hootsuite plan allows you to add up to three social profiles. I use Hootsuite in two main ways:

  1. To view and retweet content from my multiple Twitter lists
  2. To capture articles I read online to tweet from either account using the Hootsuite browser plugin.
My Hootsuite set up

My Hootsuite set up

The only thing I don’t like about Hootsuite (and I really, really don’t like it!) is that it does not block retweets. Don’t get me wrong, retweets are fine! But for me the purpose of creating Twitter lists was to ‘curate’ the volume of tweets I see everyday. Twitter itself has an option to turn off retweets, but Hootsuite for some reason doesn’t incorporate this feature.

Other tools I have tried:

  • TweetDeck is another free tool for viewing lists and scheduling tweets, and I actually really like it, and still use it if I am just catching up Twitter rather than actively sharing and scheduling content. Unlike Hootsuite, it does not show retweets in your lists if you have turned them off in the native Twitter site. The reason I don’t use Tweetdeck for sharing content is that while it does support multiple Twitter profiles and scheduling content, it’s just not as streamlined as HootSuite.
  • Buffer is also free, and is great -it’s much more slick that Hootsuite and I think their  browser plugin is nicer to use than Hootsuite’s. The only reason I’m not using Buffer now is that the free version allows you to add three social profiles, but they can’t be from the same platform (i.e. you can’t add two twitter profiles :( ). However, if you are casual Twitter user and just tweeting from your own account, I found Buffer to be a really nice tool.

So that’s what’s currently working for me, but I am sure I will change as these tools evolve or new tools are introduced (which may be in the near future given current criticism of the Twitter platform). Something that is missing from this discussion is using Twitter in multiple languages. I am sadly mono-lingual, and I tweet exclusively in English. If there are any Library people out there who have experience with any of these tools (or other social media platforms) for sharing content in multiple languages, I have a question for you: would you like to write about it for this blog? Please let us know, we would love to hear from you :)