How many Twitter accounts do you have, and how do you manage them?

By Andy MerrettTwitter

I’ve realised that the number of Twitter accounts I own is rising to compete quite happily with the number of active email addresses and domain names I own.

Not surprising, really, for as well as my personal Twitter account I have a number of identities tied to the various blogs I run. Admittedly, many of those function on autopilot, thanks to services like Twitterfeed. However, I do like to inject my own personality into them from time to time by manually tweeting.

Herein lies the problem.

My desktop Twitter client of choice at present is Tweetdeck, but (unless I’m missing something really obvious) there’s no easy way to switch accounts.

I know some desktop clients do allow this, but I’ve not found a reliable way of doing so. A couple of weeks ago I accidentally tweeted a reply to someone from the wrong account (via the web) because I’d forgotten who I was logged in as. Fortunately it didn’t really matter as it was strangely on-topic, but it could have been embarrassing or just off-topic.

If you’re a single account Twitter user, this won’t be a problem to you. My question is to those of you with two or more accounts. How many do you have, and how do you best manage them at your desktop and when mobile?

15 thoughts on “How many Twitter accounts do you have, and how do you manage them?”

  5. i have only one twitter account.i dont understand when you have many twitter accounts.it sounds too meaningless to me.

  6. The advantage of more than one Twitter account would be if you want to tweet in various niches, perhaps tied to web sites/blogs, rather than having everything in one Twitter account.

  8. I just downloaded Tweetdeck. I like that I don’t have to have multiple websites up, that makes it easier. I now just need to figure out how to use it. Thanks for the post.

  10. Twhirl works for me – you can have one feed window for each account, and even set the non-primary accounts to only fetch @replies and direct messages if you like.

  11. If the Web interface is good enough for you, try using Chrome. Just open several “incognito” mode windows and you’re good with different identities. I use this when logging in using different usernames on Gmail and other web services.

  12. I have nine accounts. Only one is fed by twitterfeed. One is my personal. Another used for chatting in tweetgrid. The others are a mix of work and personal projects.

    The main glue:
    I use hootsuite to make posts. I love the scheduling feature. I’ll nail out a bunch of posts and schedule them out over time.

    @replies
    To keep track of @replies, I subscribe to RSS feeds from search.twitter.com and keep track in my Google Reader.

    keywords
    I’ll also do searches for particular keywords and respond to those people via HootSuite. Hootsuite does do searching too, but I don’t want to have to manually search keywords every time. It’s nice how I can use Google Reader to keep track of what I’ve seen and what I haven’t seen yet.

  13. From a desktop standpoint, you can’t go wrong with Digby. While functionality is slightly stripped down when compared to TweetDeck, you can put in as many Twitter accounts as you want. Get a rundown of activity or make a tweet yourself just by dragging over the icon in the systray.

    I only have two accounts myself, so when I’m mobile, I have one attached to SMS and keep one bookmarked in mobile IE.

    Frank

  14. Like you, I use TweetDeck for my primary account. For my other accounts, I’m only concerned about following up with an @ replies I get. I’ve added all of those accounts to TweetLater.com, and have it send me a daily digest of any @ replies they get. Most get none in any given day, so it’s not overwhelming. So far it’s worth rather well.

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