Monday, April 21, 2014

How To Twitter by Stacey Myers - Book Review - Day 32

Every Accomplishment Starts With The Decision To Try

How To Twitter Book Review


Getting started with Twitter can be a daunting experience. I must admit that I've only dabbled in it from time to time without any real sense of purpose. Why would anyone want to follow me and who do I want to follow? What interesting topics can I discuss in 140 characters or less?

However, the more and more I research social media, the more I see that Twitter is an extremely important platform and one that should be considered if you are going to grow your business (and that's what we're doing, right?!) So, I picked up the book How To Twitter: Getting Started with 30 Daily Do-ables by Stacey Myers. I figured this would be a good starting book, especially since I still didn't quite get why I wanted to be on Twitter.

I'm happy to say that it was money well spent. It's a quick read, which is good because I wanted to get started right away once I finished the book! This book doesn't overwhelm you and is filled with a lot of images and examples to help you to understand Twitter.

I categorize the book in 3 sections: Beginner Basics, How-To, Advanced Topics.

Beginner Basics
The first part of the book starts with the absolute basics. If you don't have a Twitter account and don't know how to start, Stacey goes step-by-step helping you to get your account activated and explains all the terminology needed to understand Twitter-talk. Since I already had an account and had been tweeting for a while (albeit not very well!), I skipped this part. But, I could tell there was a lot of really well explained basic information while I skimmed through it.

How-To
The How-To section covers the ins-and-outs of tweeting and the all important etiquette involved.
Areas Stacey covers in-depth are:
  • Retweeting and Favorites
  • Starter ideas for what to post
  • @mentions, @replies, and direct messages (etiquette is very important here!)
  • Scheduling tools
  • Hashtags
  • Lists - what they are and how/why to use them (she gives great examples of how you can build relationships using lists)
  • Link shorteners
  • Twitter search
  • Finding people to follow
  • How to be retweetable
  • When to post
  • Posting images
  • Trends

Advanced Topics
The last section deals with more advanced features of Twitter. Once you get comfortable with Twitter and want to increase your presence, there are a multitude of widgets, apps, and general suggestions for managing your account that Stacey discusses. I'm not at that point yet, but it's good to know that I have the book available for when I'm ready. Topics she explains include:
  • Website widgets- one great widget you can install is to display your Twitter feed on your website
  •  Linking to individual tweets - used when you want to reference a tweet in your blog, Facebook, etc.
  • Managing followers and who you follow
  • Promoting your Twitter account
  • Mobile Apps
As you can see, this book covers a wide variety of Twitter topics, but is done in a fashion that is very do-able. I felt much more comfortable with using Twitter after I read this book and in the 1 1/2 weeks since I started applying her suggestions, my Twitter followers have increased quite rapidly. More important, I'm having fun with it and I don't feel the least bit overwhelmed.

I downloaded the book from Amazon for $2.99 and I'm extremely happy with my purchase!

Do you have any books that you suggest? I'd love to hear from you.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Theresa! Thank you ever so much for reviewing my book. It makes me very happy that is was helpful to you and has assisted you in building your Twitter audience.

Stacey