Читать книгу Work Smarter with Twitter and HootSuite - Alexandra Samuel - Страница 5

2

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 guide to the different features of Twitter. Twitter Power, by Joel Comm et al., provides a comprehensive guide geared especially to those who are using Twitter as a marketing tool for their businesses. If you’re looking for a very quick Twitter 101, you can find one on my blog.

When it comes to using HootSuite, again, this book isn’t an intro guide. Instead, I focus on the aspects of HootSuite that allow you to use Twitter more efficiently and effectively. If you need help getting started, HootSuite’s own Getting Started guides (online) cover the nuts and bolts.

Full disclosure: I started using HootSuite before I knew it was a Vancouver success story. Because I live in Vancouver, I know its founder and many of its employees. HootSuite also has a partnership with Vision Critical, my employer, to offer a Twitter survey tool that is managed from within the HootSuite dashboard. Later in this book, there’s a quick overview of two major alternatives, but HootSuite is the tool that I find most useful in organizing my Twitter experience.

Finally, things change fast in the world of social media! For updates and comments about how things have changed since this book came out, please visit http://alexlov.es/twitterupdate.

About Me

I joined Twitter as @awsamuel in early 2007 (putting me in the first million of its now 200 million users). This book draws on my experience not only as an enthusiastic user, but as a social media researcher, trainer, and strategist. From my PhD research at Harvard, where I began my dissertation work by investigating the impact of the internet on the modern workplace, to my role leading social media for online research giant Vision Critical, I have spent sixteen years advising professionals and organizations on their web, social, and Twitter strategies.

Over the years, I’ve shared some of what I’ve learned on my blogs—at hbr.org, on Oprah.com, and on my own site at alexandrasamuel.com—and in training sessions across North America and overseas. In that work, I’ve found that the combination of Twitter and HootSuite offers an efficient way to organize your reading experience so that it’s relationship-centered and context-specific: through lists and column views. HootSuite also helps you build those relationships by scheduling your tweets more easily and allowing you to maintain the Twitter presence you want.

So let’s get started.