In February, Twitter announced a notable upgrade for TweetDeck – an app often used by social media professionals and businesses – which introduced support for shared access to Twitter accounts through a new “teams” feature. However, at the time, the support was only enabled for web, Chrome and Windows users – leaving Mac users out of luck. Today, that’s changed with the release of an update to the TweetDeck Mac app, which now brings teams support and more to Twitter’s software for power users, including the ability to view GIFs and videos in-line, DM in groups, share tweets via DM and other features.
In case you missed it the first time around, TweetDeck Teams is the real killer addition among the bunch. The new feature allows a Twitter user who manages a given account to delegate access to as many others as they like, then remove that access when it’s no longer required. To do so, the process is fairly simple – the user selects the account they want to provide access to, then types in the name of the delegates to authorize. Those users then receive an email invite which they have to accept in order to join the team.
For companies who have multiple staffers managing their social media presence, the addition is a welcome change over the current process, which in the past has often involved the sharing of passwords directly. That can put a business’s Twitter account at risk, since end users can sometimes be careless with passwords – leaving them written down on post-it notes or in insecure spreadsheets, for example.
The feature was also notable as it was the first time that Twitter itself got around to offering its own solution to this security issue with software developed in-house.

The TweetDeck Mac app update also today brings a number of other features that were previously available on other platforms, including the ability for multiple users to chat via direct messages (DMs) as well as the ability to share a tweet through a DM to others. You can also now share up to four images with a tweet through the TweetDeck interface, and GIFs and videos will now play in-line.
And for those who subscribe to Dataminr, a real-time social media analysis engine used by financial institutions, news organizations, government agencies and others (which also just picked up $130 million in funding), the updated TweetDeck app will now support the ability for users to add columns and receive notifications of new alerts to their Dataminr watch lists.
Other minor bug fixes round out the update, which is rolling out now on the Mac App Store.
