Authors: Joel Comm and David Taylor
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Reviewer: Lucy Perrin, content executive, The Marketing Practice
Telling B2B marketers that social media is an essential tool for businesses is like preaching to the choir. What differentiates Twitter power 3.0 from the usual praising of social media is that authors Joel Comm and David Taylor actually provide guided instruction on how to use Twitter to dominate your market.
The first half of the book worried me as it’s quite basic. There’s a lot of focus on the profile setup and it appears far more suited to a novice tapping into Twitter. However, the second half is packed with advanced tools to facilitate business growth and build your brand via the site for the more established user.
Posting the right content can be challenging for businesses. We understand that it’s a great platform to market our proposition, but it’s hard to do this without feeling like we’re at a Bangladeshi flea market shouting as loud as we can to make a sale.
Comm and Taylor tackle this with a whole section of expertise dedicated to content – so your timeline looks less like a shop window and more like an open door. They supply the vital reminder that your profile should be used to reflect an interest in and understanding of your customers. Also, they provide a handy set of third party tools to measure the success of the content you’re posting.
The books format goes beyond the typical how-to style that guidebooks often fall victim to. It’s filled with analogies that make you think strategically about using the 140 characters to increase your following. My favourite part is when the authors compare corporate profiles to Big Brother characters; the most discussed and followed are those that have an opinion and a distinctive persona.
While I wouldn’t declare it a Twitter bible, I’d definitely recommend it to anyone yet to crack their B2B Twitter strategy.
