Little did I know that there’s been a kid’s ministry hashtag (#kidmin) in use since February 3rd – and it’s been fairly widely adopted.  So why haven’t us student ministry people been using one?  Well, for one, it might be because of the method that we choose to update from.  With so many people using SMS to update their status these days, it becomes a chore to A) remember to use the hashtag and B) fit it in with the other content of our tweets.  Also, at one point should we use it and and what point should we not?  Just because we in one way or another work in student ministry doesn’t mean that all of our tweets should be labeled that way, does it?  Don’t get me wrong – I think it’d be great to aggregate all student ministry tweets.  The best possible would be just like Zappos does it, having people in student ministry submit their usernames to be included in the stream.  I don’t have the programming skills or time to set something like this up, but it would be great if someone out there did.

Until what I’ve just described happens, Josh, I, and several others have agreed on #StuMin, which keeps in line with #kidmin.  Spread the word in tweets worldwide!  Copy and paste the tweet below!  You’ll be able to track the use of this Twitter hashtag here or here.

RT @StudentMinistry: The people have spoken. Use #StuMin in your tweets about student ministry! Please RT! http://cli.gs/NvZa1P

Let me introduce you to a nice little application called Twhirl.  This Mac and PC friendly program allows you to create a list of your Twitter accounts and login one-by-one.  Each account is shown in it’s own application window, and gives you the same functionality as the Twitter website, plus more.

Pros

• View direct messages, replies, favorites, and archive of your own tweets
• View friends and followers
• Follow other Twitter users
• Add tweets to favorites
• Use Twitter’s lookup feature (for usernames) as well as Twitter Search (for content in all tweets)
• Tweetscan Search
• Desktop notifications for new tweets
• Upload to TwitPic
• Shorten URLs (using one of  three different short URL providers)

Cons

• Can’t view multiple accounts in one window
• Lack of automatic brand mention tracking

While Twhirl is loaded with features,  I’m hesitant to commit because of the inability to handle multiple accounts from one window.  However, this is likely a great solution for many of you who don’t want to have a browser open at all times to manage your Twitter accounts.

Update:  You may also want to read How to Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts On Your Desktop

As someone who manages several Twitter accounts between work and my personal life, I was thrilled to come across Splitweet this week.  Splitweet is a website that allows you to  setup the credentials for each Twitter account you run to pull all of your Twitter feeds on to one page.  The tweets from all of your accounts appear in one stream. While this sounds like it might get confusing, the service assigns each of your accounts a different color.  To the far right of each tweet, there is a small box that is colored to coincide with the account that the tweet is associated with.  It uses the same feature to show you which accounts you sent each tweet from.

Just as if you were logged into Twitter, you can post tweets, send replies, and even direct messages across all of your accounts.

One thing I love about the site is the ‘brand mentions’ area in the sidebar. Rather than having to use TweetScan or visit Twitter Search, Splitweet displays any mention of your brand on the same page that you send and read your tweets from.  It displays your most recent @replies in the sidebar as well.

While I absolutely love how much easier Splitweet has made my life over the past few days, there is one major feature that keeps me going back to the Twitter website from time to time.

The site does not give you the ability to manage your followers.  Yes, there are sites that allow you to do this outside of Twitter – such as MyTweeple.com.  But the goal here is consolidation.  I don’t want to have to visit more than one site to manage my accounts (mainly because I’m lazy).  As a general rule, I try to follow everyone that follows me.  While Splitweet does show you an estimated ‘tweet audience’ when you choose which account to send a tweet to, there is no way to see your newest followers and follow them back.  So for my main LifeWay account, StudentMinistry, which gets a couple of new followers every day – I still have to visit Twitter to manage them.

In addition to Splitweet, this video by CHURSMO shows how you can use Netvibes to display all of your accounts on one page.  However, Splitweet offers more funcationality.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Overall, I give Splitweet 4 out of 5 stars.