TweetDeck or TweetWRECK?
Unpopular opinion alert: I find TweetDeck to be more frustrating than useful. TweetDeck is a website that helps you manage multiple twitter accounts, which is a handy tool when I have to manage several social media accounts for my job and most importantly, scheduled tweets! The best part of this website is that I can narrowcast my tweets to my target audience (college students) by scheduling my posts about events at a specific time. It is important to schedule my tweets at a specific time because I post on social media for my job and if I can narrowcast my media to the time that most college students check Twitter and therefore gain the most interactions with my post. However, I find that TweetDeck over-complicates their site and has an unfriendly user interface.
I use several Photoshop programs and if that isn’t the most intimidatingly un-user-friendly application out there, I don’t know what is. The differences lie in their layout; with a little bit of training, Photoshop’s buttons are easy to locate. It doesn’t display all of its functions in one overstimulating screen. TweetDeck, on the other hand, displays layered menus that tend to be confusing, and even though users can delete some of these menus, I find modifying these menus to be a time-consuming, frustrating diversion when I already have an important Twitter account to manage. When I do delete the extra menus (“scheduled tweets”, ”likes”, “mentions”, etc) it does not even zoom in to the single menu I want to work with. As a result, I have had to limit what I can do on the website even though the service offers many more features; I am left only to log on, schedule my tweets and navigate away from the site as quickly as possible.
This application offers an excellent concept, but it can be executed in a way that highlights the premise of the app itself: to offer a faster and and more simplified means of enabling Twitter’s “power users” to effortlessly complete their work.
Furthermore, Twitter bought TweetDeck for $40 million to keep the website out of the hands of their competitor, UberMedia. They then made some changes to the social media savvy population’s beloved application. Despite TweetDeck members’ outcries, Twitter killed the mobile version of TweetDeck. Also, I have noticed that when I select a photo on TweetDeck, it redirects me back to Twitter. This is Twitter’s not-so-subtle way of saying use our app only! It only makes sense that the TweetDeck website would be so awful; Twitter would rather people to use their website!
Nowadays Twitter allows users to seamlessly switch accounts, but I still cannot schedule my Tweets! Why does Twitter think it’s more imporatnt to be able to tweet polls but not post them at certain times of the day? Why am I so passionate about this?
Maybe Twitter and I have something in common: we need to get our priorities straight.
