Ok maybe I am late to the game but for the last month and a half I have been using TweekDeck. If you follow me on twitter you will notice that I am not a big tweeter, I am however turning into a big consumer of tweets.

Twitter has really turned into a major news source. It is not only where I go to find out in real-time what is going on around me (like what was that loud boom in my neighborhood), it is also becoming one of my primary news sources for my industry, my company and myself.

If you can think of something and say it within 140 characters, you can enter your thought into the thought stream. The only way of being able to visualize the thought stream is with a app like TweetDeck. You can enter in any search term you want like “Email Marketing Solution” or “Mobile Marketing” and then sit back and like that little email box that fades in and out when you get a new email in Outlook, anytime someone puts a thought out on twitter and it matches your search criteria you get alerted. The most important terms in my industry are now popping up on a second by second basis. It takes me no time at all to glance at the new tweet, and within a split second I can decide whether or not I want to take some sort of action. I follow my name in case anyone is talking about me, if they are I engage with them personally. I follow my company name for the same reason and most of the time it is people telling the world what a good experience they had with us. If they are a client, I like to do something special for them.

As I stated above I also follow important search terms. What you will find is that you get someone looking for a solution, email , mobile or otherwise. You can reach out and contact that person directly and now you are using the thought stream as a way to generate leads. I also love how easy it is to re-tweet something you found interesting. If you don’t tweet as much as I do, but you know it is important to do so for a decent sized following, then the re-tweet is a great feature and one that is easily done using TweetDeck.

On a personal note, I only use facebook for friends and family. I don’t like logging into facebook on my mobile device or from a desktop, it takes time and it’s a time suck, so it is nice to not have to log in anywhere to see your friends status updates and wall posts, TweetDeck also provides this functionality.

I bet within 5 minutes of this post someone is going to tweet this article, and then others will re-tweet it. Heck I will tweet it now, so to get some more views to my blog.