Copyright 2013 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation
Twitter and Tweet are trademarks of Twitter, Inc. HootSuite™ is a trademark of HootSuite Media, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.
The web addresses referenced in this book were live and correct at the time of the book’s publication but may be subject to change. The web addresses as well as the Twitter, HootSuite, and other interfaces as described in this book were correct at the time of the book’s publication but may be subject to change.
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Acknowledgments
Thank you . . .
@agwieckowski For your brilliant edits, which can’t fit into 140 characters, and for your wit, which frequently does.
@VisionCritical For colleagues who have helped me see Twitter in a new light through their enthusiasm and their social media research.
@eric_andersen For the introductions that showed me what Twitter can do, and for being the best Twitter publicist ever.
@hootsuite_help For jumping in with the real-time answers that let me finish this manuscript on time.
@harvardbiz For the best editorial team, and the most engaged readers, any author or blogger could imagine.
@Danaosiowy@dpontefract@wazaroff@kk@laurenbacon and the rest of my Love list, for making me love Twitter as much as I love all of you.
@RobCottingham For being Twitter user #10229, convincing me to become user #809885, and for my favorite Twitter conversation: wetweet.ca.
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Introduction
This short book shows you how to make the most of Twitter in your professional life, focusing the way you take in information and streamlining the way you share your knowledge and ideas with the world. It shows you how to use Twitter alongside HootSuite, a separate platform that allows you to access Twitter more efficiently and effectively.
This book offers strategies, tricks, and workflows for both relative newcomers to Twitter and for well-established tweeters. If you’ve been daunted by or skeptical of Twitter—or if you’ve been using it only reluctantly—you’ll find that with the right tools and tactics, even a moderate time commitment can have a big and meaningful payoff. If you’re already an enthusiastic Twitter user, you’ll discover tips that will help make reading and posting to Twitter faster and easier, and more closely tied to the people and relationships that matter most to you.
What This Book Does
Twitter is now one of the leading social networks, with a reported 200 million active users worldwide. It’s become an important way for professionals to learn about their industries and their world, share their own ideas, build relationships with their colleagues, and extend the impact of their work.
But for a lot of people, Twitter is a fire hose: a high-speed, high-pressure, high-volume flood of posts, many of them frustratingly close to useless. If all you’re looking at is that incoming fire hose, you’ll be overwhelmed immediately.
The sheer volume of tweets is one of the reasons Twitter can be overwhelming, but there’s another: Twitter’s native interface. Visit Twitter.com in your web browser, and you’ll have only limited options for how you read or post tweets, and even for how to view the lists that you set up. That’s why many Twitter users choose to use a client application: an alternate interface for reading and posting tweets. Finding the right client is invaluable. Virtually every committed Twitter user I’ve worked with got excited about Twitter only after he or she stopped relying on Twitter.com and starting using a separate piece of software to read and post tweets.
With over 5 million users, HootSuite is one of the world’s leading Twitter clients, with powerful options for managing personal, professional, and organizational accounts on Twitter. Most crucially, it lets you organize your Twitter lists into separate columns (“streams”) and tabs that make it easier to read tweets. The tactics and tools I recommend in this book center around HootSuite because its column-based view and other features support a relationship-driven Twitter presence that allows you to focus on specific groups of people, rather than on every tweet coming at you. While there are other multicolumn Twitter clients available, HootSuite also allows you to schedule tweets to go out at a later time or date, read and post from multiple Twitter accounts, and view and update other social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ brand pages.
In this book, I’ll show you a strategy that uses Twitter and HootSuite to help you focus on the people and relationships that matter most to you. It involves three steps:
1 First, you’ll learn how to organize your relationships with Twitter lists so that you tune in to the right people. You’ll cut out the chatter so you can hear the voices that matter and learn how to discover new voices worth your time and attention.
2 Next, you’ll learn to listen with HootSuite by reading tweets in the lists that give you the context to listen carefully. You’ll create a dashboard that puts streams of valuable conversation a click away.
3 Finally, you’ll join the conversation by finding your Twitter niche and tweeting consistently and easily with HootSuite or another tweet-scheduling tool. You’ll learn how to quickly and easily queue up tweets linking to online content you discover. I’ll also show you a system for maintaining an active Twitter presence without a huge footprint on your schedule.
By learning how to both read and post tweets more effectively, you’ll gain a powerful way to engage with your key colleagues and friends, and your global network.
What This Book Is Not, and Where to Learn More
This book isn’t an introductory guide to Twitter. It assumes that you have signed up for an account and that you have some familiarity with the service and its terminology—tweets, following, retweeting, @replies, and hashtags.
Instead of a broad-based introduction, this book gives you the best tactics for using all of that functionality in a way that focuses your time and attention as you use Twitter and HootSuite professionally.
If you do need a primer on the basics, you can find many “how to use Twitter” manuals, both online and at the bookstore. Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein’s The Twitter Book covers all the basics and is a handy reference