[Book Review] Claire Diaz-Ortiz - Twitter For Good

It’s a telling sign that my lasting impression of this book isn’t guidelines for using Twitter, but multiple anecdotes about water aid agencies and adventurous trips to developing countries. Entitled ‘Twitter For Good’, the guide certainly emphasises the ‘for good’ part – this is the book for the internet user with a conscience.

The advice given is good, if a little vague at times. The book relies heavily on company specific case studies and the ratio of charity/twitter content is probably 50/50 – basically, as much as this is a book about Twitter, at times it feels just as much a book about aid organisations.

While there’s nothing bad about this per se, it means the focus of the book kind of wafts from place to place – and while it’s neatly divided up into a TWEET acronym of chapters, the tips provided are often pretty general and unconfined. The book even devotes its final quarter to going over all the points it’s just illustrated all over again, now in the form of two more case studies (one of which is fictional).

On the plus side, the book is well-researched with lots of example tweets and up to date info (covering subjects such as the Egypt Uprising and Japan earthquake)  – in an area as rapidly changing as Twitter and the internet, it’s vital that this kind of stuff didn’t feel out of touch with the present.

Overall, this feels very much like an impulse purchase book – it’s cheap and cheerful, rough and ready. If you’re totally new to Twitter and fancy a quick start guide and some good basic tips, you’ll probably find this book pretty helpful. If you’re an experienced user though, there’s little merit contained in these pages.