There are some unique challenges to searching social media for research purposes. An excellent place to start is this guide to doing social media research (updated June 2023), including Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, and four other major platforms.
You can find public social media posts using Google and other search engines (e.g. DuckDuckGo, Bing). You'll likely get different results than what you get searching inside the app.
Find Facebook posts:
nigeria vaccines site:facebook.com
Find posts from Tiktok or Instagram:
nigeria vaccines site:tiktok.com I site:instagram.com
Use the vertical pipe | character to separate the website URLs.
Find specific kinds of social media content:
Find Instagram posts (instead of profiles) using Google:
keyword site:instagram.com/p
Find TikTok videos (instead of Discover pages w/ multiple videos) using Google:
keyword site:https://tiktok.com/@
Limit search results by date range
*Important caveat: Dates in Google may reflect when content was indexed, not uploaded. Always confirm date information, including using the Youtube Data Viewer or TikTok Date Extractor those sites.
Posted before Nov 1, 2021:
"fly a drone" site:tiktok.com before:2021-11-01
Posted after 2021:
"fly a drone" site:tiktok.com after:2021
Posted between 11/1/21–3/1/22:
drone site:tiktok.com after:2021-10-31 before:2022-03-02
You can use Talkwalker's free social media search to monitor keywords and hashtags across multiple platforms and sites.
Learn more about Talkwalker social media monitoring.
Use this tool to search across multiple social media platforms at once. (Just like when you're searching Google, you'll only get public posts in your results.)
Here's an example search:
