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Social Media Research

Tools and guidance for using social media in your research

Guides & Tools for Social Media Research

Get information about videos

Platform-specific research tips:

Identify trends and popular stories

 

How-To & Data Journalism Resources

 

Searching Social Media

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.

Social Media Searcher makes it a bit easier to do these searches. Here are examples to try and adapt with your keywords:

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. Includes posts from the past 7 days.

  1. Fill out the form to sign up for a free Talkwalker account.
  2. Login to Talkwalker Social Search
  3. Look up a keyword related to your topic to see how frequently it has been discussed over the past 7 days
  4. See the Results tab for actual posts. You can sort your results by engagement (e.g. shares on different platforms), comments, and other measures. Also see the Top Themes and Influencers tabs.

Platforms you can search: Bluesky, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, Substack, Twitter/X, and Youtube

Learn more about Talkwalker social media monitoring.