TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter accounts. It is now owned by Twitter.
N/A
Visible Intelligence, discontinued
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Visible Intelligence, developed by Visible Technologies and formerly offered under the name Cymfony, was a listening tool with an analytics dashboard. Visible was acquired by Cision, and later discontinued.
TweetDeck is ideal for complex media organisations / newsrooms where you want to keep track of several users accounts, or switch between multiple user and/or title accounts. It is perfect for those who want to follow conversations in real-time via many channels, at a glance. It is also useful for those who want to schedule tweets to provide around the clock coverage even when unmanned. Now that it paid-for is less suited to smaller organisations with tight budgets.
The only time I have trouble recommending Visible is to my clients of specific markets. We work with several McDonald's co-ops and we can't narrow our searches to a specific region for example, to the state of Iowa or Kansas City region.
TweetDeck is the best platform to schedule tweets - it is far better than the website itself. The process is remarkably easy and scheduling a day's worth of tweets takes no more than 10 minutes.
Tracking news is very easy on TweetDeck due to being able to create multiple columns each focusing on a different subject. Columns can be created using handles, searches, hashtags, and trends, and this makes TweetDeck a great platform as a news editor.
The way the cloud of related terms, a.k.a "social media differentiating terms", was organized into a chart with the frequency of appearance was extremely helpful. Each term was also a link to other terms that may be related to your research as well, which was insightful.
Visible Intelligence allows you to view the differentiating terms across platforms. This is particularly a useful tool when trying to compare and understand what is being said and where exactly (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
Most of the social media analytical tools allow you to view "sample content". However, and I find this extremely useful in many cases, Visible Intelligence allows you to directly connect with the person that posted the content. Because of such feature more clarification can be accomplished.
TweetDeck has an editing feature for scheduled posts only if there is no image attached. When a post with an image needs editing, users must instead delete the entire post and reschedule it with the edits needed.
TweetDeck has a real-time display, however users often need to refresh the window manually to get scheduled posts to appear in the appropriate column.
TweetDeck users can scroll side to side to view all off the types of columns selected. This functionality often leads to traveling back to a previous page unintentionally.
Firehose terms. I wish there was a place in setting or somewhere that let us know what firehose terms we currently have. To make it really great it would be nice for it to also show a history of what terms we had in the past with dates and the start dates of current firehose terms. I can't tell you how many times we've had to reach out to our rep to let us know what we currently have in place and when you have multiple users in the agency using the tool, it's near impossible to keep track of when changes were made.
Exports, I wish there was a way to have larger exports. And if you can't, an easier way to break down larger exports. For example, say my timeframe is only 1 day and I have over 20,000 results in that day– there is no way for me to export all of those results by breaking it down because my only options are most recent, most relevant, klout, most confident, most influential, most followers, positive, negative. There's no option to break down 1 day by the first 20,000 then the second 20,000 and so on. Instead I have to then manually break it down by media type and hope each one of those is less than 20,000.
Author influence, I know this algorithm is tricky but at the very least I think it could be better explained within the tool so when clients ask questions we can answer them. It could be nice to have some filtering options with this because several authors get a 99 score and it's not valuable information.
Tagging, when tagging content it is extremely annoying that I can't add new tags in the "select tags" drop down. It takes too much time to go in to where I can add new tags and then go back to where I was.
It'd also be nice to have setting for a stream where only a certain folder or folders of tags display. So when I'm in client x's search the only tags that display are client x's instead of all 5 clients and I have to keep scrolling through to find what I need.
Archive, when you hit archive on a post it does nothing. It stays in your search and ends up in all you charts which skews your data. What I do now is I created an actual tag called "archive" (because if I didn't tag it with that and I exported everything nothing in the excel doc tells me I hit Visible's archive button for that result) I export the search, I remove everything I tagged as "archive" in excel and then I manual make charts. When I hit Visible's "archive" button it should be completely removed and if I made a mistake and I want to un-archive it, there should be a section where I can go and see everything I archived and be able to un-archive it.
As I previously mentioned, if TweetDeck were to increase some features and integrations, cleaned up its interface, and developed a tool to measure ROI, it would remain competitive with HootSuite and Hubspot. Altogether, it is an effective tool for the job of scheduling and monitoring your impact on Twitter, it falls behind other competitors that offer a more robust solution.
I loved the way Visible Intelligence was similar yet different from Radian6. Although I have more experience with Radian6, it still wasn't hard to use and get familiar with Visible Intelligence. I personally liked how easy it was to do your "thing" and conduct your analysis using VI. That is plenty of reason for me to consider re-using it in any project that requires social media analysis.
It's a pretty easy tool to use I find a few of the columns to be a bit repetitive. If you are managing more than one account you'll start to find yourself having easily 10 plus columns all tracking all different information which creates nice track lanes to keep all that relative information in one column or "view". With the amount of data that is pushed out, if you are following a large number of accounts, it's extremely easy to lose valuable posts in your feeds. As you begin building out your columns they get the point where you only look at one or two and the rest seem to be lost. Overall, this a free tool and there are other social monitoring tools that are out there but are in the multiple thousands of dollar range
TweetDeck tends to be available for use majority of the time...however, I've had times where it would get stuck in a loop and then post my Tweet multiple times.
I've never had to contact customer support. Tweetdeck has always worked like a charm for me. And, if I have had a problem, I've simply deleted the column, then recreated it and it worked again. While it's not without its glitches every once in a great while, it's worked like a charm.
Several years ago I used the Hootsuite Free service. I found Tweetdeck to be preferable because of its user interface, and greater functionality. Moreover, I recall Hootsuite bombarding me with emails that were just irrelevant. TweetDeck just does what it does, without hassle. Its UI and functionality for multiple accounts seems to be the best I've tried.
