An introductory survey of social media sites, combined with a generalized approach to analytic tools and metadata, is presented in this book.

The first seven chapters provide background, and discuss privacy control and general concepts related to social media. These include basic demographics, behavior patterns, connections between users, and location data. These variables combined with simple and obvious methods to glean information about users or groups support the author’s purpose of pitching to an audience with very little experience using social media. Indeed, the author states that the intention of the book is to demonstrate how social media investigation of an individual by another individual can be a powerful and intrusive tool.

If you are an absolute beginner with little or no experience and are seeking an easy way to find information about an individual or group, this book provides a step-by-step guide to do so.

Chapters 8 to 20 introduce the most commonly used social networking sites or apps, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, and online dating sites, for example. Each site has a chapter overview and an explanation of the components likely to provide useful data. For example, the author suggests name, likes, and associations as a good place to start for Facebook, and tweets, retweets, hashtags, following, and follower information for Twitter.

Chapters 21 and 22 provide a guide to analyzing networks and introduce a free tool, NodeXL. This is a simple add-in for MSOffice and can provide information such as visualizing data, nodes, edges, paths, and graphs. These chapters are more useful and return better quality data than the previous discussions as they go beyond using just a simple search box. Ironically, searches done via these tools are also logged by the site host. A guide to installing NodeXL, navigating, metrics, and visualization is discussed in some detail. The author also notes the in-built analytic tools provided by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media networks.

Chapters 23 and 24 extend the survey to groups and individuals by skating over several demographics. I found this chapter and, indeed, most of this book simplistic. I am not convinced that there would be a substantial audience requiring such a generalized summary of social media networks. Much of what is discussed is learned by simply using social networks.

Chapter 25 gives an example of how to use a fake Facebook account to investigate, spy on, or stalk a particular person by acquiring mutual friends. Both the target and the investigation were somewhat mundane, and the results uninteresting and superficial.

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