The Twitter Book, 2nd Edition

Book description

Twitter is not just for talking about your breakfast anymore. It’s become an indispensable communications tool for businesses, non-profits, celebrities, and people around the globe. With the second edition of this friendly, full-color guide, you’ll quickly get up to speed not only on standard features, but also on new options and nuanced uses that will help you tweet with confidence.

Co-written by two widely recognized Twitter experts, The Twitter Book is packed with all-new real-world examples, solid advice, and clear explanations guaranteed to turn you into a power user.

  • Use Twitter to connect with colleagues, customers, family, and friends
  • Stand out on Twitter
  • Avoid common gaffes and pitfalls
  • Build a critical communications channel with Twitter—and use the best third-party tools to manage it.

Want to learn how to use Twitter like a pro? Get the book that readers and critics alike rave about.

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Table of contents

  1.  
  2. Praise for the first edition from Amazon reviewers (we don’t know these folks!)
  3. About the Authors
    1. Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly)
    2. Sarah Milstein (@SarahM)
  4. #TwitterBook
    1. The hashtag for this book is #TwitterBook
  5. Introduction
    1. What is Twitter?
    2. What’s Twitter good for?
      1. Ambient intimacy
      2. Sharing media and commentary
      3. Breaking news and shared experiences
      4. Mind reading—and mind opening
      5. Business and civic conversations
  6. 1. Get Started
    1. Sign up
    2. Understand what “following” means
    3. Don’t follow people yet
    4. Quickly create a compelling profile
    5. Find the people you know on Twitter
    6. Get suggestions for cool people to follow
    7. Tweet from the road
    8. Test-drive the 140-character limit
    9. Trim messages that are too long
    10. The secret to linking in Twitter
    11. Figure out how many people to follow
    12. Join a conversation: the hashtag (#) demystified
    13. Key Twitter jargon: tweet
    14. Key Twitter jargon: @messages
    15. Key Twitter jargon: retweet
    16. Key Twitter jargon: DM
    17. Key Twitter jargon: trending topics
    18. Key Twitter jargon: tweetup
    19. Twitter jargon: Fail Whale
    20. Try it for three weeks or your money back—guaranteed!
    21. Get help from Twitter
  7. 2. Listen In
    1. Use Twitter search
    2. Take advantage of advanced search
    3. Four important things to search for
    4. Save searches
    5. Track search with email alerts
    6. Hunt down—and back up—older tweets
    7. Search the nooks, crannies and archives of your account
    8. Stay on top of several searches at once, including live-event coverage
    9. Track tweeted links to your website
    10. Dig deeper on trending topics
    11. Find out what people are reading
    12. Bookmark links for later reading and draw attention to tweets now
    13. Use a life-changing third-party program
    14. Life-changing program #1: Seesmic
    15. Life-changing program #2: TweetDeck
    16. Use a great mobile client
    17. Follow smart people you don’t know
    18. Figure out who’s influential on Twitter
    19. Keep track of friends and family
  8. 3. Hold Great Conversations
    1. Get great followers
    2. Reply to your @messages
    3. Retweet clearly and classily: Part 1—the overview
    4. Retweet clearly and classily: Part 2—retweets vs. quoted tweets
    5. Retweet clearly and classily: Part 3—use the Retweet button
    6. Retweet clearly and classily: Part 4—quote a tweet
    7. What to retweet
    8. Troubleshoot your retweets
    9. Ask questions
    10. Answer questions
    11. Send smart @replies
    12. Get attention gracefully
    13. Tweet often...but not too often
    14. Three cool hashtag tricks
    15. Know your followers
    16. Unfollow graciously
    17. Don’t auto-DM (for crying out loud)
    18. Don’t spam anyone
    19. Don’t let third-party apps spam (or tweet) on your behalf
    20. Fight spam
    21. Recover fast if your account is compromised
  9. 4. Share Information and Ideas
    1. Be interesting to other people
    2. Make sure your messages get seen
    3. Link to interesting stuff around the web
    4. Link appealingly to your blog or site
    5. Use the hub-and-spoke model to your advantage
    6. Link to a tweet
    7. Post pictures
    8. Live-tweet an event
    9. Provide customer feedback—griping and glowing
    10. Overhear things
    11. Publish on Twitter
    12. Participate in fundraising campaigns
    13. Make smart suggestions on FollowFriday
    14. Mark tweets as favorites to draw attention to them
    15. Post on the right days and at the right times
    16. Repost important tweets
  10. 5. Reveal Yourself
    1. Post personal updates
    2. Go beyond “What’s happening?”
    3. Use the right icon
    4. Fill out your full bio (it takes two seconds)
    5. Spiff up your background
    6. Cross-post to Facebook, LinkedIn, and more
    7. Divulge your location
    8. Post your Twitter handle widely
  11. 6. Twitter for Business: Special Considerations and Ideas
    1. Listen first
    2. Have clear goals
    3. Integrate with your other channels
    4. Start slow, then build
    5. Figure out who does the tweeting
    6. Reveal the person behind the curtain
    7. Manage multiple staffers on one account
    8. Coordinate multiple accounts
    9. Be conversational
    10. Retweet your customers
    11. Offer solid customer support
    12. Post mostly NOT about your company
    13. Link creatively to your own sites
    14. Make money with Twitter
    15. Advertise on Twitter...maybe
    16. Report problems...and resolutions
    17. Post personal updates
    18. Use Bit.ly to track click-throughs and create custom short domains and URLs
    19. Engage journalists and PR people
    20. Follow everyone who follows you (almost)
    21. Four services for measuring Twitter
    22. Three bonus tools for business accounts
  12. A. Continuing the conversation—and taking a break from it
  13. Index
  14. About the Authors
  15. Copyright

Product information

  • Title: The Twitter Book, 2nd Edition
  • Author(s): Tim O'Reilly, Sarah Milstein
  • Release date: November 2011
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781449314200