Great book to get in the right mindset for using Twitter as a professional and business platform

Why are you on-line? Why do you have a blog? Why do you Google? Why do you look at videos on YouTube? We all are on-line for various reasons. Mainly we want to share ourselves with others, we want to connect, we want to be involved in the world and form a community in cyberspace.

We gather on Facebook to connect with old and new friends and update people on what is on our mind. We email because it is so instant and we can read and write emails whenever and wherever we want. We send text messages when we do not want to pick up the phone (or cannot make a call). Some people like to engage in IM sessions (which I find rather tedious).

If you have yet to discover Twitter, you are missing out. It is addictive. Twitter lets you send out brief text messages from the web or via your mobile phone. I downloaded the Tweetie application to my iPhone and I think it is great on the go—one of my British friends suggested it to me. I do find it unusual that Bluetooth and tweeting seems to have picked up first in Britain (60% of Twitter’s traffic is outside the U.S., mostly in the UK, Spain, and Japan) and now is catching on in the States. Like a Britpop invasion. A few years ago, I dated a guy from England, and he used to text me all the time. I thought it was so annoying. He said, “We do it all the time in the UK.”

"Ever since I stumbled onto Twitter, I’ve spent many hours thumb-typing messages. I do it frequently and I love it. It’s fantastic fun, like writing a personal blog but without the effort." –Joel Comm

Once I started to read Twitter Power, I realized that there is so much more I should and could be doing on Twitter and there is so much more to learn. There are tons of sites to search to find people to follow and for tracking purposes. I actually may have approached Twitter differently if I had read the book before I started to Twitter but I will utilize tons of informative nuggets from Twitter Power.

As with any new site or product, sometimes it is difficult to navigate and easy to get others upset with your newbie style or faux pas. I found Twitter Power to be a well-planned, easy to read guide to Twitter. Although some aspects did not apply to my uses for Twitter, I found many tips that I will use in the future. Even if you are not an on-line marketing person, you will benefit greatly from this book. If you are relatively new to Twitter, as I am, Joel Comm walks you through every aspect of Twitter you could want: the basics of setting up your profile (even choosing a name); proper tweet writing etiquette; how to decide who to follow and how to attract your own followers; and how Twitter enables you to increase the hits to your blog, web site or product. ( )

The best book on Twitter among the few. Twitter is growing at a very rapid rate, and companies are benefiting greatly by correctly using social media techniques and strategies. I would read this book as a solid foundation for understanding Twitter. ( )