Recently I made the conscious decision really begin focusing on my online efforts and putting in the thought and the time to making my online presence something meaningful and useful to others rather than just a mashup of randomness.

Therefore I have set out to reading some new books on better managing an online presence and the first book that I opted to read is “The Twitter Book” by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein. I have been getting into Twitter a lot more recently and wanted some hints and tips on what I might be doing wrong and surprisingly what I found was a book that teaches not only how to make the most out of twitter but also teaches specifics such as tweeting for the professional and tweeting as a business.

My thoughts on The Twitter Book

I can happily say that the book gave a great insight into some of the things that had been doing me a disservice on Twitter as well as a some skills to look toward building the strength of my presence on Twitter. Without going into too much detail as I respect copyright, the book contained some great ideas on how to retweet effectively, effectively using hashtags, tracking trends, effectively interacting with new leads to possibly get new contacts/followers and a whole lot more. The book starts from the very beginning and gives an overview of Twitter, how to sign up and so on, so for those that are not as savvy with the service it can take you from the very beginning to making the most of the service. It also goes so far to have a chapter specifically dedicated to tweeting effectively for businesses.

What I would love to see in the next edition

There were a couple of ideas I had while reading the book of what might be great to see in the next edition. While reading the book there were lots of references to different third party services which was a really welcome insight however I would have loved to have seen a summary page at the back which included each URL again, the service name and a one liner to jog the memory of what the service offers. Although I was reading the book as an e-book I could see how this would benefit the print version especially as you may not be near a computer while reading it but also for both just as a great little reference tool for later on.

The other idea I had was once again for a little summary page at the end of the book which just has a summary of the key things to remember on each topic that you could essentially print out and have on your desk for the first few weeks while finding your feet so you could draft your tweet, quickly check that you have followed the good points and have not done anything bad then post your tweet.

Final thoughts

I am certainly going to be putting a lot of the learnings into play on Twitter and I think that for the two and a half or three hours it was well worth the time and money to gain a better insight into how I can get twitter to work for me.

So if you want to follow me on twitter drop me a line on @StuartCRyan and if you want to learn how to really make the most of it, do yourself a favour and grab yourself “The Twitter Book”.