5 Twitter tips from Steve Martin

Thanks to 10 years of blogging and writing several marketing books, I’m on the “official” list of book reviewers.

Unfortunately, after reading dozens of hastily published books, I find it hard to recall even a handful that I might recommend. The sadly predictable fact about most of these social media guides is that the longer the page count, the more useless the book.

One of my favorite books hardly anyone would consider a social media guide. It is written by a prolific actor, writer and banjo player who is almost 70 years old—Steve Martin. The book is only 103 pages.

Steve Martin is an unlikely social media guru.

In fact, when he first started using Twitter in 2010, Martin said he approached it much the same way any celebrity might:

“I started tweeting purely for commercial reasons. I realized that when I did a television show to promote a book or record, and that television show had an audience of, say, four million people, about four hundred of them rushed out to buy the book or record. I figured if I had a Twitter audience of four hundred thousand—and that audience was tuned into me—and I promoted a book, then four hundred thousand of them would rush out and buy my book. Instead, forty of them rushed out to buy my book.”