The Social Media Research Toolkit is a list of 70+ social media research tools curated by researchers at the Social Media Lab at Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University. The toolkit is updated annually and only features tools that have been used in peer-reviewed academic studies. Most of the tools featured are free to use and require little or no programming.
Last Update: March 1st, 2021
In addition to curating the Social Media Research Toolkit, the Social Media Lab also develops social media data collection and analysis research tools to support social science research on online communities and online participation. Our two flagship research tools, Communalytic and Netlytic, are used by thousands of students, educators and researchers around the world each year. For a complete list of all of our research tools and visualization dashboards, see the Tools Page.
Communalytic is a research tool for studying online communities and online discourse. Communalytic can collect and analyze public data from various social media platforms including Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook/Instagram (via CrowdTangle). It uses advanced text and social network analysis techniques to automatically pinpoint toxic and anti-social interactions, identify influencers, map shared interests and the spread of misinformation, and detect signs of possible coordination among seemingly disparate actors.
is a text and social networks analyzer that can automatically summarizes public conversations and discover communication networks from social media posts. It uses various APIs to collect public posts from Twitter API 1.1, YouTube and RSS feed. It can also supports the analysis of your own datasets via .text/.csv. files.
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| Num. of Citations | Name | Description | Platforms | Coding Req? | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25100 | Gephi | Gephi is the leading visualization and exploration software for all kinds of graphs and networks. Gephi is open-source and free. | N/A (Must import datasets) | N | Free |
| 17200 | Hootsuite | Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard | Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube | N | Pay |
| 7530 | NodeXL | NodeXL is a network analysis and visualization software package for Microsoft Excel. | Flickr, Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia | N | Freemium |
| 3050 | Brandwatch / Crimson Hexagon | Get deep insights into consumer opinion on any topic from across the social web. | Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Forum, Download, Review | N | Pay |
| 2660 | Tweepy | An easy-to-use Python library for accessing the Twitter API. | Python | Free | |
| 2080 | Meltwater Social (Sysomos) | Offering a comprehensive set of solutions that support the full spectrum of your advanced social analytics and management needs. | Twitter, Blogger, Forum, Wikipedia, Video, Download | N | Pay |
| 954 | Twitonomy | Browse, search, filter and get insights on the people you follow and those who follow you. | N | Freemium | |
| 869 | TAGS | Google Sheet template which lets you setup and run automated collection of search results from Twitter | N | Free | |
| 835 | Datasift | Analyze trends and topics from the world’s largest source of public opinion. | Bitly, Blogs, Boards, DailyMotion, Disqus, Facebook, IMBd, Intense Debate, LexisNexis, NewsCred, Reddit, Topix, Tumblr, Videos, Wikipedia, Wordpress, YouTube | N | Pay |
| 709 | Issuecrawler | The IssueCrawler is a web network location and visualization software. | Internet | N | Free |
| 699 | Netlytic | Netlytic is a cloud-based text and social networks analyzer that can automatically summarize and discover social networks from online conversations on social media sites. | Twitter, YouTube, RSS Feed, or text/csv file | N | Freemium |
| 524 | Digmind | Social media analytics for businesses. | Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Blogger, Forum, Review | N | Pay |
| 522 | Facepager | Facepager was designed for fetching public available data from Twitter and other JSON-based API. | Twitter, YouTube, Websites | Python | Free |
| 485 | Audiense | Utilise social data to understand the audiences that matter most.We empower organisations to intelligently engage individuals at an unprecedented scale | Facebook, Instagram, Twitter | N | Pay |
| 478 | DiscoverText | DiscoverText is a cloud-based, collaborative text analytics solution. With dozens of powerful text mining features, the DiscoverText software _x0003_solution provides tools to quickly and accurately make better decisions. | Twitter, SurveyMonkey | N | Pay |
| 446 | Crowdtangle | CrowdTangle is the leading content discovery and social monitoring platform for publishers and brands. | Facebook, Instagram, Reddit | N | Apply |
| 403 | Webometric Analyst | Webometric Analyst is a free Windows-based program for altmetrics, citation analysis, social web analysis and webometrics, including link analysis. | Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, Flickr, Mendeley, Altmetric, Google Books, WorldCat. | N | Free |
| 367 | Youtube-dl | youtube-dl is a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. | Youtube | Python | Free |
| 318 | yourTwapperKeeper | Simple, easy way to archive data from Twitter directly on your server | PHP, Perl | Free | |
| 291 | Twitter Advanced Search | Twitter Advanced search using key words, phrases and hashtags. | N | Free | |
| 287 | Python-twitter | A Python wrapper around the Twitter API. | Python | Free | |
| 270 | Twython | Twython is the premier Python library providing an easy (and up-to-date) way to access Twitter data. | Python | Free | |
| 260 | Infoextractor | A framework to extract relevant information from various sources such as blogs, YouTube, and Twitter | Youtube, Wikipedia, Blogs | N | Free |
| 226 | DMI-TCAT | DMI-TCAT allows one to retrieve and collect tweets from Twitter and to analyze them in various ways | PHP | Free | |
| 204 | Tweet Archivist | Tweet Archivist collects data directly from Twitter based on the user’s search terms. The user can also use this tool analyze the data to show information such as top users, words, URLs, hashtags, and more. Finally, users can download the dataset as either an Excel or PDF file. | N | Pay | |
| 192 | StreamR | This package provides a series of functions that allow R users to access Twitter's filter, sample, and user streams, and to parse the output into data frames. | R | Free | |
| 184 | Mozdeh | A free Windows program for keyword, time series, sentiment, gender and content analyses of tweets. | Twitter, YouTube, Reddit | N | Free |
| 154 | YouTube Data Tools | This is a collection of simple tools for extracting data from the YouTube platform via the YouTube API v3. | Youtube | N | Free |
| 154 | OutWit Hub | OutWit Hub explores the depths of the Web for you, automatically collecting and organizing data and media from online sources. | Internet | N | Freemium |
| 152 | Social Feed Manager | Social Feed Manager is open source software for libraries, archives, cultural heritage institutions and research organizations. It empowers those communities’ researchers, faculty, students, and archivists to define and create collections of data from social media platforms. Social Feed Manager will harvest from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo and is extensible for other platforms. In addition to collecting data from those platforms’ APIs, it will collect linked web pages and media. | Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Sina Weibo | Python, Django | Free |
| 128 | Twurl | Twurl is an OAuth-enabled curl for the Twitter API | Ruby | Free | |
| 107 | Foller.me | Foller.me is a Twitter analytics application that gives you rich insights about any public Twitter profile. We gather near real-time data about topics, mentions, hashtags, followers, location and more! | N | Free | |
| 95 | Vtracker | The most complete tool for monitoring social networks | Twitter, Facebook, Insatgram, YouTube | N | Pay |
| 87 | Textexture | Textexture visualizes any text as a network and enables the user to use this interactive visualization to read through the text in a non-linear fashion. Using the network one can see the most relevant topics inside the text organized as distinctively colored clusters of nodes, their relationship to one another, and the most influential words inside the text, responsible for topic shifts. This way the user can navigate right into the topic of the text that is the most relevant to them and use the bigger (more influential) nodes to shift into another subject. | Youtube, Text | N | Free |
| 87 | Twarc | twarc is a command line tool and Python library for archiving Twitter JSON data | Python | Free | |
| 80 | Nvivo/Ncapture | A place to organize, store and retrieve your data so you can work more efficiently, save time and rigorously back up findings with evidence | Internet, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube | N | Pay |
| 77 | Chorus | Chorus is a free, evolving, data harvesting and visual analytics suite designed to facilitate and enable social science research using Twitter data. | N | Free | |
| 72 | Visibrain Focus | Visibrain is a media monitoring tool for PR and communications professionals, used for reputation management, PR crisis prevention, and detecting influencers and trends. Visibrain’s unique techxlogy brings together online press, blogs and social media, capturing all online activity around a brand, in real time, xise free. | Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, and online press | N | Pay |
| 68 | Socioviz | SocioViz is a social media analytics platform powered by Social Network Analysis metrics. | Twitter, Facebook | N | Freemium |
| 66 | Twitter Audit | A tool used to check how many of your Twitter followers are real. | N | Freemium | |
| 57 | Hosebird | A Java HTTP client for consuming Twitter's Streaming API | Java | Free | |
| 54 | Trendsmap | Twitter trending hashtags and topics from anywhere in the world; Analyse and visualise any topic, hashtag, word, user, or tweet in detail. | N | Pay | |
| 53 | VOSON/Uberlink | VOSON is web-based software incorporating web mining, data visualisation, and traditional empirical social science methods (e.g. social network analysis, SNA). Text analysis, dataset manipulation and visualisation, and social network analysis (SNA) are available within an integrated environment. | Twitter, Reddit | N | Pay |
| 47 | Info Extractor | Extracts relevant information such as title, tags, comments and view count from various sources like blogs, YouTube, and Wikipedia in a format that is easily exported. | Youtube, Wikipedia, Blogger, Huffington Post | N | Free |
| 47 | Twint | An advanced Twitter scraping & OSINT tool written in Python that doesn't use Twitter's API, allowing you to scrape a user's followers, following, Tweets and more | Python | Free | |
| 46 | One Million Tweet Map | Tweet map per locations up to 6 hours old, with a keyword search option. | N | Free | |
| 34 | Social Bearing | Insights & analytics for tweets & timelines | N | Freemium | |
| 29 | Affinio | Affinio is the marketing intelligence platform that is changing the way you relate to your consumers. | Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest | N | Pay |
| 28 | Amnesty YouTube Dataviewer | Extract Youtube Metadata- Reverse image (video still) search and exact uploading time. Here’s an Advanced Guide on Verifying Video Content. | Youtube | N | Free |
| 26 | Gravatar | Your Gravatar is an image and public profile that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site? | Blogs | N | Free |
| 26 | Telegram Analytics (tgstat) | Search open Telegram messages | Telegram | N | Free |
| 25 | iScience Maps | iScience Maps is a free Web service for scientists interested in using Twitter content in their research. This service allows one to assess the effects of specific events (e.g. a natural catastrophe or a political election) as they are voiced on Twitter. For example, make comparisons between cities, regions or countries for terms or combinations of terms and monitor their evolution in the course of an event. | N | Free | |
| 24 | Echosec | Helping Companies Identify Threats from Social Media And Darknet Data | Various | N | Pay |
| 20 | InVID | The InVID innovation action develops a knowledge verification platform to detect emerging stories and assess the reliability of newsworthy video files and content spread via social media. | Twitter, Instagram, Facebook | N | Free |
| 19 | Digitalfootprints | Collect closed Facebook data with user consent; retrieve data from selected profiles, view stats and search for specific data / content, sort and filter content | N | Free | |
| 19 | Pulsar Social | Pulsar helps you find the story in the data by bringing all your digital audiences into one place and leveraging the power of AI and data visualization | Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram | N | Pay |
| 16 | Twecoll | Twitter command-line tool written in Python, can be used to retrieve data from Twitter and purge likes (its only data-altering feature) | Python | Free | |
| 9 | Webometrics | program for altmetrics, citation analysis, social web analysis and webometrics, including link analysis | Youtube, Twitter, Flickr, Goodreads | N | Free |
| 8 | Facebook Video Downloader | Download Facebook Videos Online | N | Free | |
| 7 | Who posted what? | Whopostedwhat.com is a non public Facebook keyword search for people who work in the public interest. | N | Free | |
| 7 | TwitterGoggles | This project is built for the Twitter Search API version 1.1 | Python | Free | |
| 5 | Twlets | The easiest way to download Twitter data. Get anyone's tweets, followers, likes, videos, and more into Excel. | N | Free | |
| 5 | Botometer (BotOrNot) | Botometer (formerly BotOrNot) checks the activity of a Twitter account and gives it a score. Higher scores mean more bot-like activity. | N | Freemium | |
| 4 | Instaloader | Download pictures (or videos) along with their captions and other metadata from Instagram. | Python | Free | |
| 4 | Removeddit | Display removed (by mods) and deleted (by users) comments/threads from Reddit. | N | Free | |
| 4 | tStreamingArchiver | tStreamingArchiver is a set of programs for archiving Tweets using the Twitter API and moving them into a mySQL database. | Java | Free | |
| 4 | Naoyun | Naoyun helps to vizualize live twitter activity. Naoyun is a software that create a bridge between Twitter and Gephi with their own Stream API. | Twitter, Gephi | Java | Free |
| 3 | Youtube Geo-Search Tool | Location-based search on YouTube | Youtube | JavaScript, HTML | Free |
| 2 | Twitter Video Downloader | Download twitter videos & GIF from tweets | N | Free | |
| 2 | T | A command-line power tool for Twitter. | Ruby | Free | |
| 2 | Youtube Geofind | YouTube Geofind; three different search functions, location, topic, and channel. | Youtube | N | Free |
| 2 | Communalytic | Communalytic is a Research Tool For Studying Online Discourse.Communalytic can collect, analyze and visualize data from various social media platforms and can automatically identify toxic and anti-social interactions, map shared interests and detect signs of possible coordination among seemingly disparate actors in online discourse. | Reddit, Twitter Thread, Instagram & Facebook (via CrowdTangle) | N | Fremium |
| 1 | Story Saver | Download Instagram Stories, Highlights and Videos Online Easily with one simple click. | N | Free | |
| 1 | Reddit Investigator | Reddit Investigator works just by collecting the data that reddit makes available and elaborates it to obtain some new useful infos. | N | Free | |
| 1 | Treeverse | Treeverse is a tool for visualizing and navigating Twitter conversation threads. | N | Free |