As an artist, speaker, blogger guy, I use Twitter for three things:

• 1. Communicate. With Twitter I can quickly and succinctly message a large number of people who (probably) want to hear from me.
• 2. Connect. Twitter turns the traditional artist monologue into dialogue.
• 3. Eavesdrop & learn. The days of assuming how I’m perceived and received are gone. Reality is there to be read, learned from and responded to.

There’s one Twitter tool I rely on more than any other: Tweetdeck. Here’s a screenshot:



Get started in a few easy steps:

• 1. After you download and install Tweetdeck on your computer, you need to enter your Twitter username and password in the “Preferences.”
• 2. Immediately, Tweetdeck will bring the tweets from everyone you’re following into the first column, mentions of your username into the second column, direct messages to you in the third column. But wait, there’s more!
• 3. Click the plus symbol at the top of the application and you can add columns of your choosing. I have a column that displays every mention of “shaun groves”, and one for every mention of “compassion international”, for instance.

Putting Tweetdeck to good use: a few examples:

• 1. I recently set up a column that displayed every tweet containing the hashtag of a conference I was speaking at. As tweets began to fill that column, I was able to visit the profiles of those who left them and, if they linked to their personal websites from their profiles, I was able to visit them there too. After the conference, I was able to see what people thought of what I’d spoken on and have some very beneficial conversations about what worked and what might have worked better.
• 2. Last week someone tweeted that they were “listening to Shaun Groves.” That tweet showed up in the column that displays any mention of my name. I chose to follow them, they followed me back, and then they visited my blog and downloaded some free music they didn’t know existed before.
• 3. In the days just after the Haiti earthquake I set up a column that displayed any mention of several terms related to the disaster. I was able to direct interested people to information about Compassion’s disaster relief fund, to provide updates from Compassion’s blog on the situation in Haiti, and to comfort and inform sponsor’s of Compassion kids in Haiti.
• 4. There are artists with a similar audience to mine. I have columns set up for mentions of their usernames. Every artist has a handful of followers who retweet what they say more often than most. Let’s call them “sneezers” – people most likely to spread stuff they like. I follow similar artists’ sneezers and they usually follow me back. So, the next time I tweet something they like, they’re more likely to pass it along.
• 5. I’m rarely criticized on Twitter. But it happened recently and I was able to see it immediately, politely ask to discuss the criticism privately, and resolve the issue quickly.
• 6. Last week someone really made my day by tweeting some powerfully kind words about the role a song of mine had played in their life. Thanks to Tweetdeck I saw them. I was able to immediately publicly thank them for the encouragement and then privately ask if I could hear more of their story and send them a gift.

Tweetdeck makes communication, connection, and eavesdropping easy and instant.

What Twitter tools are you artists using and how?