We often get the question “How is TweetRiver better than the Twitter app I currently use?” We decided we’d compile a blog post to hit a few highlights.

1. There’s more on Twitter than your timeline.

Lots of businesses we talk to are looking at their Twitter timeline.   This, of course, is important.

It only lets you see, though,  the customers, users, and partners that you’re following on Twitter.  Also, your timeline is typically only a small portion of your company’s presence on Twitter.  What about the thousands of people that you’re not following?   What about all the people that are talking about your company and/or  products that don’t know your Twitter screen name or use an abbreviated shorthand?  Are you finding those people and engaging them?

TweetRiver allows your business to pull in all of the tweets to, from, and about your organization.   Pull in your timeline, your mentions, your hashtags, and your product names. What about common phrases?  How do customers talk about your brand or products on Twitter?

It seems like every day that we talk to a customer who says, “I watch this stuff everyday. I had no idea how much I was missing.”

Many existing corporate Twitter clients are very timeline-focused.  They have search capabilities, but they’re offered as a bolted-on appendage; the tweets that are pulled in via a search interface aren’t stored. They’re transient, so if you’re not watching, you miss them.

Other tools are wholly built around search, but don’t take any steps to make those tweets operational for the business.  Without the capability to take action on the tweets, these apps limit themselves to being purely monitoring solutions.

TweetRiver bridges that gap. Its focus: bring all of the tweets about your business to one place, store them, categorize them, route them to the appropriate resource, and allow you take action on them as you see fit.

2. Don’t just read your tweets.

OK, so you’re finding your tweets. What are you doing with them? Responding to some? Following everyone you can (and hoping they’ll follow you back)? Perhaps you’re just scanning for buzz and hoping to create a little with a few choice tweets of your own.

Why not publish some of the tweets back out to the web? We have local taco shops in Austin that get 15-20 tweets per week with people raving about their food, telling everyone to go check them out. Think about that: 15-20 testimonials a week. Why not put that on your website? In the case of most of these little taco shops, it’s a lot stronger marketing message than the boring 1-page website they’re showing. Now take that and scale it up to the buzz that a major brand, product, or entertainment company can generate. Why not bottle it up and get it back out there?

TweetRiver provides a powerful moderation platform for publishing tweet streams. We can help you weed out the spam, filter out the profanity or off-color comments, and help keep things on topic. And you’re not limited to one stream; you can create topical streams for your home page, product pages, community sites, and conference events.

3. Keep things secure.

Businesses care about security.  Balancing this need to be safe with the desire to engage customer through a medium that promotes complete transparency can be challenging. TweetRiver understands these requirements. We’ve built a suite of security features to help protect your business and internal users on Twitter. We know those legal guys are concerned.  Don’t worry.  We can help.

We support multiple roles, permissions sets, access to individual streams, and user groups. We also allow you to control who can tweet on the company’s behalf and whether of not they need a secondary approval before the tweet goes out. And once the tweets do get out, we keep an audit log of all messages. We can go back to any point in time and tell who tweeted what for your company.

4. A place for every tweet and every tweet in its place.

If you’re taking our advice on Point #1, you’re going to be looking at a lot more tweets. Navigating one giant timeline or search list of tweets is not the most efficient workflow. Categorization and automatic routing are a must; you want to easily differentiate customers asking for help or complaining about a new product bug from kudos or praise.

This is done using rules in TweetRiver.  As each tweet is discovered, it is analyzed for dozens of different factors. Add rules to look for keywords and intelligently route the former tweets to your Support organization and the latter tweets to the Marketing department.

When you’re ready, move beyond keyword-based categorization to take advantage of TweetRiver’s tweet scoring capabilities.  Flesh out your scoring profile such that Twitter spam indicators route a low-scoring tweet to the Trash, and quality tweets from well-known authorities are placed in a Featured stream and auto-published to the web.

As this blog post might indicate, TweetRiver is one hundred percent focused on creating the absolute best Twitter web application for business. Every customer we’ve spoken with has tried other corporate Twitter tools and has found them, for one reason or another, lacking. If you’re not already a TweetRiver customer, and your business is itching to really engage with your customers via Twitter, now is the time to create your TweetRiver account.

Go now.  Try it free for 30 days.  You won’t be sorry.