18 Feb TIP: Use Tweetdeck to solve your password-sharing Twitter problem

Unlike Facebook, where you are allowed to add several users with different levels of access, up until today that was not possible on Twitter. Technically not a feature of Twitter itself but the Twitter-owned social media dashboard Tweetdeck, this is Twitter’s first ever move to address the issue of teams collaborating on a single Twitter account without the need to use third-party app such as Buffer or Hootsuite, or the not so safe practice of sharing passwords.

How does it work? It’s simple: instead of sharing an account’s password the administrator can add contributors. These people will be able to log in to Tweetdeck and have access to the account they were invited to, but only the administrator will retain the ability to add or remove users. Both contributors and administrators can build lists, follow or unfollow accounts, send Tweets and schedule Tweets, so the difference remains in the security of being able to add or remove people as you need. For a clear step-by-step guide, watch Twitter’s video tutorial on how to use this new feature:

Why is this important? So far, if somebody from your team or a previous collaborator left you most likely had to change passwords and let everybody else know. Now, you get to add people in and out as needed. Plus, it’s a great reason to get people using Tweetdeck over the regular web Twitter client! If you are unfamiliar with Tweetdeck, go ahead and try it out for free – it will allow you to create different columns so you can visualize all sorts of streams simultaneously (ie. tweets, tweets from a particular list, direct messages, @ mentions, scheduled tweets, particular user’s tweets, a search for a particular word or hashtag, etc.)

Hopefully Twitter considers building this into their standard product somehow. For example, they could allow for users to designate their accounts as personal or business, with the latter being able to give access to personal ones as contributors just like in this new Tweetdeck feature. Following two important new features introduced only a few weeks ago, Twitter seems to be kicking off 2015 with some great solutions for Community Managers, and we can only hope more improvements are on the way!