Social Media Research

Compare search terms over time.

Researchers may apply for access to the Meta Content Library and API which incudes comprehensive access to the full public content archive from Facebook and Instagram. Offered in partnership with ICPSR.

Free account for one project to run social media searches for brand tracking. Includes analytics with sentiment and simple demographic filters.

Twitter’s official social media dashboard. Manage multiple Twitter accounts in a single dashboard, and create streams of feeds from people you follow, trending posts, or keyword searches of your choosing.

Free snapshot reports based on user, hashtag and keywords. Requires permission to access you Twitter account. Subscription pro account also available.

Find official social media posts and press releases from figures and departments of the U.S. government.

A tool designed to help marketers learn more about their target audiences, including aggregate information about geography, demographics, and purchase behavior on Facebook.

Suite of web analytic tools for websites of all kinds.

Manage social media campaigns and online content. [$]

Instagram Insights provide information on who your followers are, when they're online and more. See also: Instagram for Business.

Use the free "Identify" tools on this page to search for social media influencers on various platforms.

Measure engagement and learn how to make your own Tweets more successful.

The YouTube Reporting and YouTube Analytics APIs let you retrieve YouTube Analytics data to automate complex reporting tasks, build custom dashboards, and much more.

Apply for access to the Twitter historical archive through a new (as of Feb 2021) Academic Research API. Available to faculty, graduate students, and others who are affiliated with an academic institution and have a clearly defined research need. For questions about using the API reach out to dash@umn.edu.

Software for fetching public available data from Facebook, Twitter and other JSON-based APIs.

The Hub enables researchers to access open user-contributed machine learning models and datasets.

Open source software that harvests social media data and web resources from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo.

Use TAGS to setup and automate collection of tweets into Google Sheets. Collects data for the last 6-9 days (based on limitations of the Twitter API).

Chrome browser plug-in for getting Twitter and public Facebook data for use in NVivo.

Netlytic is a community-supported text and social networks analyzer that can automatically summarize and visualize public online conversations on social media sites. It is made for researchers by researchers, no programming/API skills required.

[Note: this resource is currently unavailable. LATIS is currently exploring whether they can provide a local instance of this tool for UMN researchers.]

Free social media data, analytics and visualization tools for researchers at all levels of expertise. Includes SMILE, an open-source social media analytics tool to collect and analyze data from Twitter and Reddit; and BAE, a Brand Analytics Environment to gain insight into how individuals and groups may interact with brands and various organizations.

A list of social media research tools curated by researchers at the Social Media Lab (Ryerson University). The kit features tools that have been used in peer-reviewed academic studies.

A social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content into a single stream of information. Best suited for tracking brands and simple sentiment analysis.

A brief overview of issues with Twitter data, as well as a directory of free tools for collecting data from Twitter.

Use Quantcast's top sites and Measure tools to find traffic estimates for website domains (free account required).

A list of topic-centric high quality public data sources. Collected from blogs, answers, and user responses.

The collected posts of 19,320 bloggers gathered from blogger.com in August 2004. The corpus incorporates a total of 681,288 posts.

The Common Crawl corpus contains petabytes of data collected from the web since 2008. It contains raw web page data, extracted metadata and text extractions.

This dataset includes two tables: data on the interest categories Facebook shows to users and the ad groups its shows to advertisers (2016).

How to download files from archive.org in an automated way using wget.

A directory of sites archiving various social media posts from members of the Obama Administration.

This database, updated daily, contains ads that ran on Facebook and were submitted by thousands of ProPublica users from around the world (via browser extensions).

Access data from posts, threads, comments, users and more from reddit and subreddits. Historical Reddit data has been collected at http://files.pushshift.io/reddit/ as monthly CSV downloads.

As a service to the Machine Learning, Data Mining, and Social Sciences communities, the Social Computing data repository currently hosts datasets from a collection of many different social media sites.

A centralized repository of researcher social media data via ICPSR. Open to submissions of social media research datasets.

The SNAP library collects data on large social and information networks since 2004.

Directory of open-access tweet datasets on DocNow, available for research use. To convert Tweet IDs to JSON files of full-text tweets and metadata, use DocNow's Hydrator app. See also: UNLV's Twitter Data Tutorial Series.

35,108 Tweets curated from seven different domains of Twitter corpus that have been hand-annotated for 10 categories of moral sentiment.

14 billion words from 22 million web pages and 95k websites.

Monthly database backups of all Wikimedia wikis in various formats.

Check out the library's guide to subscription data archives and resources.

Led by the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University, the project focuses on studying practices behind and attitudes towards the collection, storage, use, reuse, analysis, publishing and preservation of social media data.

Marketing courses and standalone videos on marketing for social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.