I talk to a lot of non-profits who use multiple Twitter accounts in their social media strategy.

Staff members, cultists, board members and sometimes even their coach promotes their cause on Twitter. Many times the question comes up about managing multiple Twitter accounts for your non-profit.

A couple of months ago, I came up with a way to selectively feed several personal Twitter accounts into a single Flagship account using RSS and a hashtag. This is a perfect way for staff members on Twitter to still have personal lives, but also pitch an occasional tweet into a main account for the organization.

But what if folks don’t want to use their personal accounts for work?

Beth Kanter wrote about this challenge yesterday in a post titled, “Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts for your Non-profit”. In it she mentions a tool that I’ve been playing with for a few weeks called CoTweet.

Beth recommends it, along with Hootsuite, as a way to have several people manage a single Twitter account.

CoTweet features you’ll love

1. Schedule tweets

You can post to Twitter right way, or select a date and time for the post to go live on Twitter. This is perfect if you happen to come across a useful article to share on #charitytuesday – but it’s Thursday.

2. Get organized

On the left-hand side, you can easily access the various different posts that your staff will need to work with.

3. Many feature choices – for each reply

For each message that you reply to, you can shrink a URL, switch to DM mode, or schedule your tweet for a later date. Also, you can select from a drop down menu of different user accounts to reply from. See “From”:

4. Robust detail on Twitter users

By clicking on an avatar, you’ll have access to a lot of details about a user. Including: conversations you’ve had, number of followers and following, date they joined Twitter, bio, link, and updates. There’s even a tab to keep notes on particular users!

5. Save searches

This feature is very similar to saving searches in Tweetdeck or Seesmic.

6. Bit.Ly stat candy

I’m not a huge stat guy, but if I was, I’d love this feature.You can identify incoming traffic coming from various different websites.

7. Email Tweets

Finally, you can email Tweets to anyone – within your organization, or outside your organization.

8. Assign Tweet

This feature allows you to assign a tweet that needs to be replied to. For example, if an intern is managing CoTweet, they might assign tweets from Ashton Kutcher to your executive director.

Conclusion?

CoTweet is a powerful Twitter application for businesses and non-profits.  It’s still in Beta, but if you bug them enough, they might give you access to an account.