How to use TweetDeck

1. Work out how TweetDeck can be useful for you

For most people, the Twitter homepage or apps for iOS and Android provide enough but Twitter bought TweetDeck with good reason: it's the best tool for personalising Twitter, by customising multiple columns, and it works in any browser.

Because you can access everything, it's called a dashboard, and it's ideal for active Twitter users who need to consume or analyse lots of information. If that's you, read on.

2. Use the columns

Put simply, columns in TweetDeck are like the timeline in any other Twitter app. However, they're highly customisable, so you can have a column for a single user, a Twitter list, a Twitter search or even a particular hashtag.

So if your company deals in cardboard boxes, for example, you might have other manufacturers in one column, industry bodies in another, and any tweet that mentions 'cardboard boxes' in yet another column.

3. Multiple accounts? No problem

One of the best things about TweetDeck is that it deals with multiple accounts with ease, so you can use it for personal and professional use – or accounts for multiple businesses or organisations.

You can even post the same tweet to several accounts simultaneously should you wish – just highlight the accounts you want to send to when you tweet.

You can specify which accounts you want to tweet to, as well as schedule a tweet for whenever you want – just choose the time and date.

4. Schedule tweets

Another great feature of TweetDeck is that you're able to schedule tweets to be posted whenever you want. This is great for company accounts where you want to make them seem as though they're updated over the weekend when, in fact, you're sitting at home in front of the fire.

Just click the 'Schedule Tweet' button in the compose panel and then select the date and time you'd like the tweet posted. You can do this for more than one account at a time.

5. Get to know collections

Collections are a step on from a simple search or user-based column. Collections enable you to organise tweets according to topics, events, interests, conversations and more, all in real time.

Add your collections as columns and you can even tweet the URL to share it with others. Think of collections as Twitter lists on steroids.

6. How to create a collection

Start by clicking the '+' icon in the left-hand navigation bar – or use the keyboard shortcut [A] – to add a new column to your dashboard.

Select 'Collections' from the menu options. Or, should you wish, you can also start a new timeline; select 'Create collection'.

Once you give the collection a title, you can begin adding curated tweets to it.

7. Adding tweets to a collection

If you find a tweet that you would like to add to your collection, select the more actions icon (•••) and then from the drop-down menu, select 'Add to collection'; this can also be done by simply dragging the tweet's 'Move' icon and dropping it on to the collection column that you would like to update.

Newly added tweets always appear at the top of the collection column. To remove a tweet, you simply need to click on the 'X' on a tweet in a collection.

8. Sharing your collection

We mentioned that you can also share your collection with other people. To do this, click on the 'Settings' icon at the top of your collection to access the column's options menu.

Then, you need to select the 'Share' menu and choose to either embed the collection on your website, view it on Twitter.com, or tweet with a link to it.

9. Send a direct message

You can also send a direct message to somebody who is following you – select 'Send a direct message' in the compose panel, type in the user you want to send a message to, and then the text of the message itself.

10. Seeing scheduled tweets

You can add a column to TweetDeck using the '+' icon to see tweets scheduled for an account. Be aware that if other people have access to the same Twitter account (for a company, for example), all scheduled tweets are visible to anyone who has access.

Be aware that you can't schedule direct messages.

11. Carry out an advanced search

You can search for anything at any time using the magnifying glass icon in the left-hand navigation bar. After you run a search, you are given the option to customise your results even further should you wish.

You can alter the parameters in several ways: 'showing', 'matching', 'excluding', 'written in', and 'retweets'. You see these options appear in a dropdown menu after you run a search.

It's easy to search for whatever you want and filter results too – here we're filtering to only show tweets in English.

12. Check historic searches

If you often search for the same bunch of terms, you're probably better off creating columns for them. But TweetDeck still makes it easy to re-run previous searches.

Click on the search box located in the navigation bar and you'll see that your previous searches are displayed on a drop-down menu.

You can always clear your previous searches by clicking 'Clear history' at the bottom of the drop-down menu.

13. Find tweets based on sentiment

It's easy to uncover whether people are feeling good or bad around a topic; simply carry out a search followed by a happy or sad emoticon. For example, you can create a search column with the keyword London :) to see tweets regarding London in a positive manner.

These kinds of searches can be useful for customer feedback, or if you're thinking of visiting somewhere, you can check out people's thoughts before you book your travel.

14. Cleverly filter results

You can customise your search results by including a filter. Let's say you only want to search for tweets that include images of Buckingham Palace.

You can create a search column using the keywords Buckingham Palace filter:twimg. Likewise, you can use filter:replies, filter:news, filter:verified, filter:hashtag, filter:images and filter:links to get even greater granularity.

15. Exclude tweets

You can also use the exclude:command to do the opposite to filtering. So exclude:twimg excludes any tweets that contain images in your search results, and exclude:links excludes tweets that contain links.

These tools are pretty powerful for pinpointing exactly the tweets that you want to find, perhaps removing link- or hashtag-heavy tweets when you want to gather together a batch of feedback or opinions.

16. Get to grips with wildcards

The asterisk is also a powerful filtering tool in a TweetDeck search column. You can run searches using keywords such as San Francisco is *.

This yields tweets containing text such as, 'San Francisco is pretty', 'San Francisco is small', and so on.

Columns can be formed from many different parameters. Here we've got a column with hundreds of tweets appearing every day, so we're filtering by Verified Accounts only.

17. Add a list to a column

TweetDeck also enables you to manage Twitter lists easily (these can be viewed on Twitter.com and in other clients, and are simply groups of users).

Click on 'Add Column' and then click on the 'Lists' option from the menu. Select which list you would like to make into a column, and then click 'Add Column'.

18. Creating new lists

To create or edit a list on TweetDeck, click on 'Lists' (next to the 'Add column' button). Click 'Create List' and select the Twitter account you would like to create the list for.

Then name the list and give it a description. Similarly, you can click the 'Edit' button to change an existing list instead.

19. Create an embedded tweet

You can easily get the code to create an embedded tweet from TweetDeck. An embedded tweet is one that's incorporated into a web page, be it a news story or blog post.

To get the code, hover over the tweet you wish to embed, click on the ellipsis (the icon with the three dots), and select 'Embed this Tweet'.

20. Filter out noise

TweetDeck also enables you to filter tweets across the entire application, either by text within the tweet, the author of the tweet (by @username) and source. To access and edit the global filters, click the settings icon (it looks like a cog) in the navigation bar.

Click the 'Global Filter' tab and select which type of global filter you would like to use. Then enter the text, user or source you want to filter out.