I just finished an amazing book by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick called The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users.

This book has so much information you will want to take notes as you read.

First up, I don’t consider myself a power user but with the amazing tips I got from this book I can be and most importantly plan to be. My social media and blogging strategy has been hit or miss.

The book starts off with picking your social media name. I wish I knew what I know now as I would have picked a different name to use on Social Media. It explains the importance of picking just the right name so you stand out and hopefully get people to follow you. Then after you have picked your name, it goes through how to optimize your profile on various social networks. Everything from your profile image to making sure your profile is a quick read. Remember in the Internet age, everyone has a short attention span.

Then the book covers how to feed the content monster. It talks about planning your content then It gives you tips and tricks on how to find great content. What? Not create your own? You can, but can you consistently put out great content every time? If so, I am very jealous and I would like to meet you. It makes great suggestions like creating a calendar or even a spreadsheet to plan your posts. And it goes into scheduling services such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social as well as using WordPress plugins to schedule your posts. Then if you can just get people to share your posts. Ah, but then the book goes into detail about how to get people to reshare your posts.

So you came up with great content that you either created yourself or you are curating from others. How do you get your words across? How do you express yourself and make yourself heard? Ah, then the chapter on “How to Perfect Your Posts” is for you. It talks about how to build value and how to build your brand so your content is read and worth reading. It also talks about how often and when you should post in each of the Social networks if you are a casual blogger or a hard core blogger and how to make the most of hashtags. If your primary readership is on a different timezone than you, publishing three hours before they wake up might not be the way to go. So the chapter goes much deeper into information about different scheduling services some of which I did not know about.

Chapter 4 explains the best way to respond to comments. Of course every comment you get isn’t all sunshine and unicorns. But to interact with those who interact with you is an important part of building your audience. Go in with a flamethrower and you will lose followers fast. But if you can use the right approach with the positive and interesting comments and the right approach with the bad comments (remember, there is learning to be had from truthful comments even if they hurt our feelings). But sometimes we are hit by trolls on the loose. This chapter helps with how to deal with all flavors of commenters and interact appropriately.

Chapter 5, 6, and 7 show you how to take your blog and your social media and work them as one team to get more followers. It goes into detail how to make your blog the destination and social media the flashing arrows pointing the way. And how to get your blog followers to want to share your content to social media sites to bring more readers to your blog. Make great content and make it easy to share with others and they will come “Field of Dreams” style. And when you share your content, pictures really help tell the story. Do you know the right size image to use for each social network to get the best traction? Tweet your blog post with a 512×1024 pixel image. Chapter 7 also talks about the best way to socialize events. There are some great ideas that almost sound like marketing a product but instead you are selling you. Guy and Peg are some really creative minds. Get everyone at the event to share their tweets with your desired hashtag.

Chapter 8 covers the best way to utilize Google+’s Hangouts feature to get maximum exposure and to create content for your blog. Seriously good stuff. It covers the equipment you need to get started and when you get good at it what to use to kick it up to the next level. I have stumbled with Google Hangouts so this was some really helpful tips.

Chapter 9 covers Twitter chat. About to go live with your next big thing? Why not have a Twitter chat to get others to talk about it with you? This chapter what’s involved and the right tools for the job.

Chapter 10 is the important one for me, “How to Avoid Looking Clueless”. It talks about how to not be a jerk on social media or at least give the impression you are a jerk anyway. And how to not look like a Nube. Nothing makes people run away faster than fresh “Nube” smell.

Then the jets fire up and Chapter 11 goes into depth about each of the major social media networks and how to master and optimize your content for them. If you don’t use Chrome as your browser, you are going to want to after you read this chapter. There are so many cool extensions for Chrome that will make Social Media sharing so much easier for you.

After chapter 11, you will be like me and have so much information rattling around in your head. Chapter 12 talks about how to put it all together. It goes through case examples on how you would use social media to promote different things like “a nonfiction book you are about to publish”.  Taking the steps one by one and putting them all together makes it all make so much more sense. This information allows you to build the total package of promotion for yourself or your brand.

The book is an easy fun read. My only complaint is I have made so many missteps and this book points them out. I have some retooling on my brand to do.