BtoBonline, a great resource for BtoB marketers, recently ran an article on Twitter tools for teams. These are applications that go beyond Tweetdeck and Twhirl and in addition to allowing you to update multiple accounts, give you the power to deal with Tweets at the organizational level. One example could be to take a Tweet asking a support question and help you assign a task and resource to act on this, allowing you to monitor how such Tweets are handled.

I’ve only had personal experience with CoTweet which works particularly well for our small marketing team:

The one thing the BtoB article provides is an excellent feature-set to consider when looking at these tools:

Multi-account support: The ability to log into and manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single application or tool

Multi-user support: Putting the team into ‘team tools’, multi-user support lets multiple tweeters work in the same environment and, if necessary, be individually identified

Statistics: Once you start pumping multiple Twitter streams, lists and contributors through a single app, the available statistics and metrics to mine begin to get interesting

Scheduled Tweets: When managing multiple accounts, at times it’s easier to batch social media work, then send it out to the world over time

List management: If you are a managing multiple accounts while trying to track different communities of interest via Twitter lists, good list management creation and tracking features are a must

So there you have it. A simple wish-list when it comes to using a team to monitor a Twitter account.