One question I get asked a lot when people find out how many Twitter accounts I manage for our company and all of our clients is,”Doesn’t that take way too much time?”

Why, yes, it does…

I search and search all the time for cool Twitter apps for business as I feel that Twitter is an explosive tool that businesses should really embrace and use accordingly. I have a found a few that I tend to use for my business and hopefully this might help you. I am featuring one here that I use and explain why.

Now even though the app is helpful, please keep in mind I am always looking for the best one available for me, so feel free to comment below of some apps that you think are absolutely a must for corporate use.

What does it do?
I am liking Splitweet at the moment because it has answered my need for a multi-user app for all my Twitter accounts for myself and my clients. Their tagline is “Multi-account Twitter management for corporate users”, and it is in beta. I had been looking for a multi-user app for so long because of the time spent on logging in and logging out of accounts for my clients. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something write in front of me where I could add ALL of my accounts and just check them off and send them? Or, how about if I had a tool where I could check off several accounts where the message might be useful across accounts? Splitweet has an area where you can type in “what are you doing?”, then to the right are all the accounts you have.

A simple to check to one of them or more will then send the message off to those accounts without you have to login into that particular account. You can also check more than one account for the same message. And they color code it so you can see below in the “Tweets you follow” area what accounts they are coming from. There is also an area for “Your brands mentions” where you can find out what is being said about your brand you enter and “Replies to your account” which will display everyone who has replied to your tweets.

The downside?
Since it is still in beta, it takes forever to upload sometimes and it is not instantaneous. They need to speed the process up much faster. And very soon as this is an app I believe will be mimicked many times over and someone could supersede their work. Another problem is when you are typing in what you are doing, cut and paste or write pretty damn fast as it has a tendency to blow you off your spot. I have tried it in Safari and Firefox and I am still having these problems and I am confident they are bugs they are working on.

The blog does not work in English. I am not saying that because I cannot read other languages (that’s what Google translation is for!), but rather if they are looking for a bigger share on the Internet, I would advise they focus on their English components because we would like to hear what’s going on in the future with upgrades and modifications.

Will it be viable?
Well, this is not the first multi-user app to come along and I am sure it will not be the last. Matt came out first from the folks at Carsonified, but never really got my interest as I was looking for something more like what Splitweet offers. (I even drew a diagram of what I wanted to my developers in hopes that had some free time over the weekend to make one…!) The “brands” can be found with Twitter Search (previously Summize).

I think what the developers were really trying to do is bring all that functionality together on one site and I give them credit for doing that. You have to give the guys props for building it in multi-languages as they themselves speak more than one language. Perfect English is not one of them, but they are trying and I give them a lot of credit for that!

I am sure an iPhone app will appear soon and if they can speed it up, fix some of the things that are stalling it, I think their audience will grow. Whether there is monetary value behind remains to be seen, and I will be following their new modifications as I use Splitweet every day for my business and my clients.

If you would like to comment on this app or give us some other business apps you use, please do so. Thanks! (BTW, I used it right now to several accounts to get the word out – another reason, too, I like it!)