@pistachio, @gruen, @geechee_girl

Do you know what #followfriday is? Do you know why I put a pound sign or hashmark in front of #followfriday? Do you know who @pistachio, @gruen, @geechee_girl are? Do you know why there is an at-sign at the beginning of their usernames? Do you know how I am getting this message to show up on Twitter and Facebook automatically?

Regular readers of my blog will recognize that #followfriday is a ‘hashtag’. It is a tag used on Twitter so that people can easily find it and other people talking about the same topic. On Fridays, people on Twitter often put up a tweet listing people that they follow that they think their followers might also want to follow. I post my message on my blog, and then use TwitterFeed to take the post and send it to Twitter. I use the Twitter Application on Facebook to take that tweet and then add it to my Facebook profile.

@pistachio, @gruen, @geechee_girl are three people from Twitter that have gotten together and written Twitter For Dummies. If you’re trying to understand what I’ve been talking about in the previous paragraphs, then this book is for you. If you’ve been to a party recently and wondered what this Twitter thing is that everyone is talking about, then this book is for you.

In the introduction, they write

We wrote this book for the first-time Twitter users. If you’ve already created an account that has some friends and followers, you can probably skip the chapters that talk about how to sign up and get moving – but you might find it useful to review the sections on how to dress up your profile. If you’re a business and have already gotten rolling on Twitter, you can probably safely ignore many of the starting chapters and check out Parts II and IV. If you’re a Twitter pro and could have probably written this book, feel free not to read anything, use this book as a doorstop and recycle it when you’re done. Okay, we’re kidding – it’ll make a great gift for the Twitter-skeptics in your life!

Well, I consider myself a Twitter Pro, I probably could have written this book myself, but I probably wouldn’t have done as good a job as @pistachio, @gruen, and @geechee_girl have. I get bored explaining to people how to set up user accounts, what CAPTCHA is, or how to customize a profile, which is another reason this book might be good for me. The next time someone looks at me cross-eyed when I try to explain Twitter, or the next time someone asks how to get started with Twitter, I can simply hand them this book.

I unexpectedly received a copy of the book for review the publisher and like Tara Hunt’s book The Whuffie Factor, I probably wouldn’t have read it if I hadn’t met @pistachio at some social media gathering or another and decided to follow her on Twitter.

Yet this illustrates the importance of The Whuffie Factor, the social capital that people build up on sites like Twitter. Twitter for Dummies is a great book for starting to get involved in Twitter and building your own social capital online.

I must admit, I have not read closely the book. With a cursory glance, it looks like they have all the correct details of how to set up an account and get started. Instead, I spent more time paying attention to the tips, technical stuff and other brief paragraphs scattered through the book on how to make the most out of Twitter. These are useful tips and I wish more people would read and pay attention to these tips.

So, that’s this week’s #followfriday. Follow @pistachio, @gruen, @geechee_girl. Go out and get their book and either read it yourself if you are new to Twitter, or give it to that friend that you’ve been trying to explain Twitter to. Then, come back next week to find more interesting people to follow on Twitter.