To Facebook Or Twitter Party, That Is The Question

I have to say, I love Twitter parties. It’s a fun way to connect with other people while at the same time trying to win prizes.

I created a Twitter account over a year ago, but never used the goofy thing. Didn’t get it. Kind of didn’t want to get it. Finally made the leap and started using it regularly. Now I l♥ve it!

Facebook I’ve had for 2-3 yrs now. I like it other than the changes they keep making. I’m not a girl who likes change.

This week I have participated in 3 Twitter parties and 1 Facebook party. I would rather do 20 Twitter parties in one day than a single Facebook party.

Why? Well, let me tell you.

When you do a party on Facebook, you constantly have to refresh the page. They don’t have a "platform” to watch the conversation, type your messages, etc, all at the same time.

Now, if you were to stay at the Twitter.com page you’d be dealing with the same thing. Refreshing constantly to keep up with the conversation. Um, no thanks. That could drive anyone to the brink of insanity!

The problem with refreshing constantly on Facebook and Twitter is that you miss so much of the conversation. To see what everyone is saying and finding the host/hostess questions takes too much time and concentration. There’s no way to “connect” with the other people participating.

What’s my answer to these issues? I personally use TweetDeck for nearly 95% of my Twitter activity. I’ve been using it since late August/early September.

Before that for Twitter parties I would use TweetGrid. They have a tab that you can click to actually participate in a Party! The problem I had with using TweetGrid was the hostess column was never updating and I couldn’t keep up with the what they were saying. I had to keep asking people to Retweet the questions that needed to be answered to try and win the prizes.

This is my TweetDeck:

I know it’s small, but on the left side of the screen are the Tweets from everyone I’m following. The middle column is anytime someone mentions @bigguysmama (my Twitter handle). The right column is the same except I can see my Tweets, too.

I think I’ll do a TweetDeck tutorial another time. I could get very distracted into that right now. There was definitely a learning curve and people in the Twitter community helped me out.TweetGrid is a good platform if it works for you. When I used it as my first off-Twitter site I couldn’t get my host/hostess button to refresh as I said above. The last time I used TweetGrid was in August. The look is similar to TweetDeck except when you join a party, they insert the #hastag for you! Why thank you very much! Here’s what a party should look like: You can enlarge these photos I believe if you click on them. On the left is everyone using the party #hashtag. The center is the hostess. The right column is anything with @bigguysmama. You can see the box right after my Tweet already has my #hashtag ready to insert into each one. I don’t have to remember to type it in or click a different box.

As for HootSuite, I see a lot of people using it. I have the free version downloaded to my Droid2 but haven’t used it yet. I also haven’t used it at home on my computer so I have no way to verify it’s ease of use.

From what I can tell on the HootSuite homepage is there are a lot of options to connect with your social networks thru them. This may be the way to go when doing a Facebook party. It’s something I will have to look into!

So tell me, have you done any Twitter parties? If so, do you use a different site to participate other than Twitter.com?

Have you done a Facebook party? Did you find it easy to keep up with the conversation?