Social Media Research

This guide provides a selection of techniques and tools for navigating social media content and platforms. The resources highlighted here don't require use of the command line, so they're suitable for users with a wide range of technical abilities.

For a more extensive look at research tools for social media (including command line tools), see Social Media Research.

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 Metadata Viewer or TikTok Date Extractor for 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