Daily Dose of social media: Get your questions answered on Twitter

5 Ways to Get Your Questions Answered on Twitter — You can just ask a question on Twitter and hope it gets answered, or you could try one of the structured services suggested here. IKnowTweet.Com, for instance, searches Twitter for phrases like “does anyone know?” and “why does?” and collects them all.

The site allows people to post questions and lets others answer them. It also offers a strong search engine. Not a bad place to start when you want a question answered on Twitter. This could be a strong tool for journalists.

Twtpoll is another interesting option. It’s a simple service to conduct polls on Twitter. Obviously these are the most scientific poll, but they could make nice little content for a blogger.

The other three services mentioned in this post are worth checking out too. Twitter is quickly becoming a strong research tool for content producers.

Is Tweetie For Mac Right For You? — I’m a fan of TweetDeck, but I realize it’s not for everyone. What I like about it — its multi-column UI — may turn off other people. TweetDeck can either be considered very helpful or very confusing. If you don’t want something cluttered (and TweetDeck has a cluttered feel), Tweetie is a better option.

Tweetie is clean, streamlined and easy to work with. If that’s your thing, I’d suggest checking it out:

Let’s face it, multiple columns is right for a percentage of Twitter users, but for the rest of us, having multiple accounts integrated into a bug-free single column view with a sleek design is ideal. Tweetie for Mac does not disappoint on that front.

The other stellar features of Tweetie are:

• Threaded direct messaging — If you send a lot of direct messages, this is an extremely helpful feature. Twitter’s Web UI (and TweetDeck) make it difficult to have back and forth conversations on Twitter, but Tweetie changes all that.
• Conversations — “A simple double-click in the body of any Twitter message will display the entire life of that tweet’s conversation history. It’s pretty convenient for those moments when you need to keep up with real-time conversations on Twitter.”
• Image options — Tweetie supports a bunch of imaging services.