I’m pleased to announce the 2nd edition of our popular Twitter user guide, Twitter In 30 Minutes: How to connect with interesting people, write great tweets, and find information that’s relevant to you. Released this week, it’s available in several different formats, including ebook (Kindle, iOS/iPad, and Google Play), paperback, and PDF versions. As part of the launch promotion, I am giving away 10 free electronic editions (more on that below) and I will also talk a little bit about the guide itself, including what’s new and why I wrote a second edition of the guide, considering the first edition was released less than a year ago!
The original 1st edition of Twitter In 30 Minutes was released in October 2013, and quickly became one of the top-selling In 30 Minutes titles. The guide targeted readers who were completely new to Twitter, explaining basic registration and “how to do X on Twitter,” using Twitter.com or the Twitter apps for iOS and Android.
However, through online reviews of the Twitter guide and emails, it soon became clear that many readers were actually people who had already created Twitter accounts, but wanted to learn how to get the most out of it.
In other words, readers weren’t just Twitter newbies. Many were people with existing accounts, but were struggling to use it. In a way, this shouldn’t be surprising. Twitter’s poor retention rate is well known. People have created millions of Twitter accounts that end up broadcasting just a handful of tweets before they are abandoned. Twitter knows this is a problem and tries all kinds of tactics to get people involved — for instance, forcing new users to follow celebrities, and sending tons of email notifications and reminders to newbies.
But for people to have positive Twitter experiences, it takes more than following Twitter’s favorite celebrity accounts. For the second edition of my guide, I really pushed these three elements:
- The importance of building a network on Twitter.
- How engagement takes place, using examples from real life.
- Best practices for publishing Tweets and other types of content.
As with the first edition of the guide, there are lots of examples from Twitter, ranging from ordinary people and small businesses (thank you, @Momogoose, @RobertFischer, and @Jus_Tish for providing such positive examples to look up to!) to the giants of the network (@Oprah actually makes a pretty good case study). You can see the complete table of contents here.
But this doesn’t explain why I created a new edition of the guide so soon after the first edition came out. The driving force was actually Twitter itself, which implemented a major user interface/user experience update earlier this year. Because of the new interface, some of the instructions in the first guide were rendered obsolete, and it became apparent that I would need to rewrite parts of the guide and retake all of the screenshots for the Web, iOS, and Android versions of Twitter. I did the bulk of the writing over the summer, and officially launched the guide this week.
To kick off the launch this week, publisher i30 Media is giving away 10 electronic copies of the guide in PDF or iTunes/iPad format. While many readers of this post already know how to use Twitter, there may be friends or colleagues who are new to Twitter, or people who already have accounts but need a boost. (UPDATE: The promotion has now ended. Thanks to everyone who entered! If you are interested in learning more about the guide, please visit the official website for Twitter In 30 Minutes, 2nd Edition.