Ok, so your grandmother doesn’t have a twitter account but she might have one soon (Opara, Shaq move over).
The reality is that we all have different groups of people that we virtually touch each day and you might want to create multiple twitter accounts (or profiles) to feed various forms of information to different groups (recipe to grandma and a bikini shot to your beer drinking friends should go out on different profiles). Here are a few software tools to help you manage your tweets, broken into two type: (1) on-line tools (which you can access from anywhere) and (2) downloadable tools (that you need to run on your machine):
(1) Online
Easytweets: lots of tools, stats, keyword search, dashboard
Hootsuite: simple, keeps all accounts on one page, free (my personal favorite)
Matt: clean and basic, but does what is needed, tweet to multiple accounts
Netvibes: easy plug-in to admin twitter accounts, and mash up lots of web stuff
(2) Download
Splitweet: for mac and pc, follow contacts and monitor your brand
TweetDeck: nice interface, slick and effective (resource heavy)
Twhirl: connects to multiple networking accounts and manages various profiles
Ok, that should be enough to get you started, download or sign-up for a few and take a test drive. I like Hootsuite the best among the online applications, mostly becaue it keeps all my accounts on one page and I can scan and manage my content easily and blast off a tweet to the profile I want with a quick tick of the icon. TweetDeck is my choice among the downloadable applications, it has lots of bells and whistles and allows for filtering ‘out’ or ‘in’ feeds so that you can follow lots of people but perhaps only interact with a selected group.
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Great post, I’d also add http://www.tweetlater.com to that list, which helps automate DMs and organize auto follows or auto removals.