CoTweet – Simple Tweeting for the Small Business

January 12th, 2010 by Michelle Moore

In the last year or two, a lot of small business operators jumped onto the social media bandwagon. It’s been a rough ride and several have fallen completely off because proper management of social media can be pretty time-consuming – and let’s face it, most small business owners are control freaks and simply don’t want to give over control of their online reputation to anyone else.

CoTweet!

Fortunately, there’s a tool out there that can help make Twitter management a little easier to share without giving up total control of your Twitter account. CoTweet is a browser-based tool that allows you to set up a parent account, and connect it to a Twitter account via good old fashioned oAuth connectivity. This means, that when you, as the Twitter account owner, gives Twitter permission to let CoTweet access your account, that’s the only time you need to log into Twitter. From then on, anyone whom you authorize in CoTweet can Tweet through that Twitter account without you giving them your Twitter login.

At first, this may not seem like such a big deal, but let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you want to hire someone to come in and read through 20 sites that you’ve hand-selected, and then tweet out 100 interesting tweets based on the information gleaned from these sites over the next three months…

You can go into your CoTweet account, invite your temporary help to create an ID under your parent CoTweet account so they can create these posts, and then they can schedule these posts to go out once a day for the next 100 days. There’s your three months worth of tweets and you didn’t have to give that person any personal information. When they’re done with their task, you can disable their access to your parent account and you don’t have to change your password.

Why Stop Here?

Now here’s what I’d like to see… someone needs t take this app and run with it, get Cotweet plugged into Wordpress. You see, I have to manage sometimes half a dozen Wordpress blogs at a time, keeping up tweets and posts for all of them. And all of them currently have my personal login information plopped right into that little Twitter plugin. What happens if my Wordpress installation is somehow compromised? It would be much better for me, as the owner of several blogs and several Twitter accounts, to be able to put the invited SUBACCOUNT login information from CoTweet into my Wordpress plugin rather than using my actual login and password… WAY better. If I ever suspect my Wordpress data has been compromised, I just remove the invited CoTweet ID.

Anyone ready to take that project on?