twitter-appFor the last few months I shifted all my personal Twitter usage over to the Dashboard app. The change was prompted by my desire to get access to the scheduling feature, more than anything. But as of yesterday I’m back to the standard native Twitter app. Here’s why:

First off, I’m not a media brand. I may have delusions of being so, but I’m just not. So having mobile access to scheduling Tweets isn’t that important. Especially now that I’m unemployed and have access to my personal computer pretty regularly, it’s only come up maybe once in the last two weeks. If I absolutely need to schedule something, it can wait an hour until I’m back in front of TweetDeck.

Second, the analytics and notifications just weren’t working for me. Notifications just shows me who has @ mentioned or directly replied to me, but that’s only half the story. Updates about RTs and Likes are kind of hidden in another tab of the app and not broken out, so you have view all your apps in reverse chronological order to see how much engagement they’ve received. That’s important (as much as anything here is) information but it’s hard to find.

Finally, on a related note, the default view of the @ mentions is the worst possible thing for an individual. This gets back to my first point that I’m not a media brand. I’m not an influencer. So having that be the screen that greets me is the worst possible experience, giving me the least relevant information upon opening the app. Again, this is going to be different for someone who’s managing a brand’s Twitter account but for me it wasn’t working anymore.

So I’m back to the standard Twitter app. It’s fine for what I need to do. It shows me the ads I actually am interested in seeing, the default view is the Timeline and the analytics – all engagement, from new Followers to recent Likes and more – are exactly where I would expect them to be. And it’s fine.