Every Accomplishment Starts With The Decision To Try
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
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.
