In Tweet Naked: A Bare-All Social Media Strategy for Boosting Your Brand and Your Business, author Scott Levy argues that conversation on social media networks should not be any different from the real world. The book is a good source for anyone who has remained untouched by the social media revolution and intends to dive into this new communication paradigm. Similarly, business owners who have not yet exploited social media for connecting with existing and new customers can learn a great deal from the book.
Scott Levy is an accomplished internet marketer with 16+ years experience, and CEO of Fuel Online. He is a regular contributor at Forbes and writes on social media.
Title: Tweet Naked: A Bare-All Social Media Strategy for Boosting Your Brand and Your Business
Author: Scott Levy
Publisher: Entrepreneur Press (December 17, 2013)
ISBN-10: 1599185156
Book Review
The title seems a bit confusing – what is the author really talking about? But there’s a hint on the cover. The ‘bare-all social media strategy’ sub-title gives an indication that the author intends you to open up your heart on the social media network to boost your brand and business. The TOC promises to give you a complete picture of social media and different strategies and actions involved in building your personal or business brand with Twitter.
The audience clearly is someone who is entirely new to the concept or at best has not used social media for business. The Foundations chapter is almost a short biography and the author’s attempt to establish credibility with the reader. The chapter mostly talks about the author’s progression and interest in technology as a kid and the various small projects he was involved in throughout his life. You could also look at it as a history lesson about the Internet and its evolution.
Chapter 1, What is Social Media, discusses the good, the bad, and the ugly of social media and how it can affect your brand. He gives background information on different social media networks and what they are good for.
The author drives home the main point of the book in chapter 2, Transparency and Authenticy. This chapter stresses that you need to show your human side to the world. The rules can be a bit different for brands from people, but they are essentially the same. As humans, we have passions, desires, excitement, and disappointment in our life. Similarly, you have peculiar likes, dislikes, and opinions on things happening around you. Putting all this on Twitter builds your character – something that a short bio cannot cover. He asks you to put all these facets of your personality on the network. The author cites various mistakes different brands have made that caused uproar – like the KitchenAid tweet. He also shares tips on how to talk business in a natural, conversational way without being pushy.
All this can work only if you have a huge following. In chapter 6, How to Build a Following, the author discusses the differences between traditional media and social media. The author points out flaws in the traditional interrupt-and-repeat model and how that may not work on social networks.
The title Tweet Naked along with the TOC gave me a strong impression that the book was all about Twitter. However, the author also talks about other networks from Facebook to Pinterest in most of the chapters. Chapter 5, Ways To Engage, talks about the type of content you can share with your followers and the kind of persona you can adopt, that is, information provider, deals announcer, problem solver and so on. I would have really liked to see tips and information on communication techniques to engage people on social networks. It gets clear after the first few chapters that the author is talking about social media in general and not about how to build a brand specifically on Twitter.
Overall, I will say that this is a great book for someone who is new to social media as it provides good information about different networks and some great tips on how to create your profiles on different networks.