Pete Codella teaches one of PR Daily’s most popular webinar series about social media tools for PR professionals. He features one social media tool every week on PR Daily.

For many, TweetDeck serves as an all-inclusive social media dashboard. It’s certainly among the most well-worn social media tools in my toolkit. Yes, it’s similar to HootSuite and was originally just a Twitter tool, but now it does so much more, on so many screens—and it’s free.

In workshops and presentations, I stress that listening through social media tools affords today’s public relations professionals a great advantage over the cumbersome, time-consuming, and expensive research we once gathered. Now we can use real-time search tools to learn what others are saying, help determine sentiment, and engage in conversations with constituents.

TweetDeck is one of those real-time search tools, and it excels at allowing you to capture and participate in online discussions. Plus, TweetDeck is easy. Here are seven ways to master this all-inclusive tool.

1. You can keep easily monitor the social media landscape. A key advantage of TweetDeck is the ability to have an unlimited number of vertical columns with which to categorize conversations. You can have a column for your entire Twitter network, plus columns for @ mentions, direct messages, hashtag searches, Twitter usernames (like that of your CEO), and keyword or phrase searches (perhaps your company’s name plus the word “fail”). I use columns in my TweetDeck software to listen to conversations that include mentions of client names, brands and people, and hashtags from conferences and events, and the occasional current event.

2. You can easily publish tweets—in the future. TweetDeck also enables you to publish posts immediately or schedule them for a future day and time. To schedule tweets, you simply click on the stopwatch icon next to the “send” button and set the day and time you want the post to be published. It will appear in a new column at the far right as a scheduled update.

3. You can easily shorten URLs and upload images. Want to share a link that’s too long to fit into a 140-character tweet, or show off an arresting image? In TweetDeck’s settings you can add services for shortening URLs and uploading images. I use bit.ly as my URL shortener and Twitpic to share pictures.

4. You can easily publish updates that are longer than 140 characters. If brevity’s not your thing, use TweetDeck’s new Deck.ly feature for posts that exceed Twitter’s limit.

5. You can easily manage more than one Twitter account. TweetDeck allows you to import a number of Twitter accounts. It’s a very useful feature. From one publishing platform I can send updates on behalf of myself, my companies, and my clients. Although this can be tricky if you accidentally publish a very personal update using a client’s Twitter account, so be careful!

6. You can easily manage more than one social media account. On TweetDeck, you can also add your Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Buzz networks to view status updates from each of those networks in their own columns in TweetDeck.

7. You can easily take TweetDeck with you—to the store or on a business trip. TweetDeck’s free software is available for your desktop, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, as well as for Android devices and the Google Chrome browser.

(Image via)