Social Media Search Strategies
Social media is a rich and valuable information source
Knowing how to effectively and efficiently search for relevant information saves valuable time
This blog post discusses three different strategies that investigators can use to maximise their data collection
Search engines
Social media search engines
Directly on platforms
History and importance of social media
Social media or social networking sites have been around for quite a while. One of the very first social networking sites, Classmates[.]com, was launched in 1995. Over the last two decades, multiple social networking sites have emerged with some disappearing and others becoming global tech giants.
Without a doubt, social media has opened up new possibilities to share and obtain information. In A Brief History of Open Source Intelligence, author Cameron Colquhoun explains why the year 2009, or more respectively the Iranian Green Movement has been so influential in the history of OSINT.
“Millions of young Iranians took to the internet to coordinate their activities, share viral content and encourage others to join in the campaign. For the first time, the internet was flooded with citizen information about a major political event, largely thanks to the combination of smartphones, internet connections and social media. During the first week of the protests, 60% of all blog links posted on Twitter were about Iranian politics.”
According to Cameron, this was the first time when anyone in the world could “mine these social networks for intelligence-grade content”. Almost 12 years on, nothing has changed. Twitter has remained a vital information source. But not only Twitter, social media in general provides access to tons of information. Because of the constantly changing social media landscape, successfully navigating it has become an important task.
Don’t waste your time
One of the things I have learned over the years is the importance of a solid methodology. Without it, you can go down a rabbit hole and get lost pretty quickly, wasting a lot of time and not producing any results.
What I recommend is a structured approach of how you go about solving your task(s) - a plan that lays out the problems you’re facing, the question(s) you want to answer, and where you think you can find the information, amongst other things. Planning and direction is also one of the first steps in the Intelligence Cycle. If you’re not familiar with this concept, I highly recommend Sinwindie’s blog post series on this specific topic.
Coming back to social media, I want to highlight another important step in deciding which platforms to use. My OSINTCurious colleague, Matthias Wilson, argues in his most recent blog post that social media is so much more than just the three big platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Especially when you search for information in foreign languages. So keep in mind that there are many other platforms that you could exploit during your data collection.
Once you’ve decided which platforms to use and you’re happy with your plan (which you’ll probably keep changing as you go along), it’s time to talk about social media search strategies. One of the main reasons why it’s important to have one is to save valuable time. You don’t want to get lost but focus on what’s most important, namely producing results or intelligence.
There are different ways of searching for information on social media, but because I like to break things down, I have come up with this three-part strategy. This shouldn’t be viewed as the only or best methodology but more as a helpful way of structuring your social media searches.
Search engines
One of the easiest and fastest ways to discover relevant social media information is by using search engines. For a quick backgrounder on how to search more effectively and efficiently, I wrote a blog post on OSINTCurious, where I explain how they work and list a couple of useful tips and tricks.
When using search engines, you need to remember, you will only discover publicly available content which was indexed by search engines. You will not find any posts from private groups on Facebook, for example. To find relevant info, use the site: operator (Google) and specify the social media site you’re interested in.
Here’s an example query for discovering information on Facebook relating to the British far-right organisation called “Britain First” and its stance on immigration.
site:facebook.com (“Britain First” OR “BF”) AND (“immigration” OR "immigrant" OR "migrant") AND (“policy” OR “politics” OR “stance”)
Google has returned about 22.200 results. If you want to refine your query, use the Tools in the top right corner and filter results by time, for example.
Screenshot: search results for search query
2. Social media search engines
A second way of discovering information on social media is what I like to call social media search engines. In essence, these are third party providers that allow you to search multiple social media platforms with one query. While you can save valuable time, using any of these services is usually not for free and comes at a price. Many of these providers operate on a free-mium basis, which means that some basic features are free, but for using the more advanced ones you have to upgrade.
A provider that I used in the past is called Social-Searcher - a “free social media search engine”. With the free version, you can submit 100 search queries a day and set up two email alerts, for example. And according to its about page:
“Users can search without logging in for publicly posted information on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, Dailymotion and Vimeo”
When searching for mentions of a keyword or hashtag, a “real-time search” is conducted. The advantage here is that you save valuable time; however, it is not clear to me how the engine actually works and how “real-time” it actually is. But if you want to get a quick overview of a particular keyword or hashtag on several social media sites, social-searcher can come in handy.
Screenshot: overview of search filters on social-searcher.com
Screenshot: search results for mentions with #OSINT
Consider building your own social media search engine!
If you want to create your own social media search engine, you can build a Google custom search engine (CSE) where you specify all the (social media) sites you’re interested in. For more info on CSEs and how to use them for OSINT, check out this blog post on OSINTme.
Here’s one I quickly built: Lorand’s Social Media Search Engine. It searches Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, and VK. Once again, you’ll only get publicly available and indexed content here.
Screenshot: search results for #OSINT (left); specified sites to search (right)
3. Searching directly on social media
The third and final way of searching for relevant information is directly on social media. The main advantage of this strategy is that you could get access to more private information which is not indexed by search engines; however, the disadvantage is that you need to create a social media account and potentially engage with your targets, which could be problematic for some people due to ethical and legal reasons.
There’s so much I could talk about how to search on social media, but this would be out of the scope of this blog post. Instead, let me list a couple of great OSINTCurious blog posts:
If you have any other suggestions or recommendations, please share them with me on Twitter (@LorandBodo) or comment below!
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
