The Social Media Research Toolkit is a list of 50+ social media research tools curated by researchers at the Social Media Lab at the Ted Rogers School of Management, Toronto Metropolitan 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: January 2024
| Num. of Citations | Name | Description (as provided by the developer) | Platforms | Coding Req? | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 41900 | 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 |
| 34300 | Hootsuite | Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard | various | N | Pay |
| 9920 | NodeXL | NodeXL is a network analysis and visualization software package for Microsoft Excel. | Flickr, Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia | N | Freemium |
| 4960 | Brandwatch / Crimson Hexagon | Get deep insights into consumer opinion on any topic from across the social web. | various | N | Pay |
| 2070 | CrowdTangle | A tool from Facebook to help follow, analyze, and report on what’s happening across social media. | Facebook, Instagram | N | Apply |
| 1390 | 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. | Youtube, RSS Feeds, Google Sheet, text/csv file | N | Freemium |
| 1150 | Hoaxy | Visualizes the spread of information using the Twitter Search API (from the last 7 days) | Twitter (via Twitter's paid API) | N | Freemium |
| 1030 | Talkwalker | A social media analytics and monitoring tool that keeps track of all brand-related online, print, and TV/radio content with real-time social listening and AI-driven consumer intelligence | various | N | Pay |
| 1010 | Digmind | Social media analytics for businesses, and the Influencer Network, a dynamic and interactive portal that lets you identify and analyze your brand’s top influencers and strongest communities on Twitter. | various | N | Pay |
| 937 | Facepager | Facepager was designed for fetching public available data from Twitter and other JSON-based API. | Twitter, YouTube, Websites | Y | Free |
| 841 | Octoparse | A no-coding web scraping tool; offers web scraping templates that can extract post and user data | various | N | Freemium |
| 687 | snscrape | Social media scraping tool | various | Y | Free |
| 664 | Audiense | Identify relevant audiences, discover amazing actionable insights and inform your strategies to grow your business. | Facebook, Instagram, Twitter | N | Freemium |
| 632 | Youtube-dl | This is a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. | Youtube, supported video sites | Y | Free |
| 584 | 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, Text files | N | Freemium |
| 534 | Webometric Analyst | Webometric Analyst is a Windows-based program for altmetrics, citation analysis, social web analysis and webometrics, including link analysis. | Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, Goodreads, Flickr, Mendeley, Altmetric, Google Books, WorldCat. | N | Free |
| 423 | TGStat | This website allows users to search for Telegram channels and examine general Channel analytics. | Telegram | N | Free |
| 404 | Twitter Advanced Search | Twitter Advanced search using key words, phrases and hashtags. | N | Free | |
| 378 | 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 |
| 293 | Media Cloud | An open source and open data platform for storing, retrieving, visualizing, and analyzing online news that collects data through RSS feeds. Users can download the collected data as a CSV. | news coverage | N | Free |
| 241 | 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. | Twitter (via file upload) | N | Pay |
| 231 | 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. | Tumblr, Flickr, Sina Weibo (latest update: 2021) | Y | Free |
| 223 | Sentiment Viz | Reddit visualisation app (sentiment, topics, heatmap, timeline, etc) | N | Free | |
| 220 | Instaloader | Captures images/videos and related metadata from Instagram | Y | Free | |
| 218 | 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 |
| 197 | 4plebs | This is a community-run archive of 4chan.org (since April of 2013) | 4chan | N | Free |
| 188 | InVID verification plugin | The provided tools allow you to quickly get contextual information on Facebook and YouTube videos, to perform reverse image search on Google, Baidu or Yandex search engines, to fragment videos from various platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Daily Motion) into keyframes, to enhance and explore keyframes and images through a magnifying lens, to query Twitter more efficiently through time intervals and many other filters, to read video and image metadata, to check the video copyrights, and to apply forensic filters on still images. | various | N | Free |
| 185 | Social Searcher | Social media monitoring (users, hashtags, terms) | various | N | Freemium |
| 179 | InfraNodus (formerly Textexture) | InfraNodus represents textual data as a network. It uses a combination of text mining, network analysis, data visualization, NLP, and artificial intelligence to provide insights about any discourse and enhance a research process. | Twitter?, Amazon Reviews, Google Search Results | N | Pay |
| 175 | PhantomBuster | Mainly for marketers, this is a tool that can extract social media account details for leads and build campaigns | LinkedIn, Instagram | N | Freemium |
| 154 | Telegram Analytics (tgstat) | Search Telegram messages | Telegram | N | Free |
| 125 | Vtracker | Tool for monitoring social media | various | N | Pay |
| 123 | 4CAT (Capture and Analysis Toolkit) | A Python-based tool that captures and processes data across different platforms; data can be downloaded for further analysis | Telegram, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, 4chan, 8kun, BitChute; via Zeeschuimer: Instagram, TikTok, 9gag, Imgur, LinkedIn, Parler, Douyin and Twitter | Y | Free |
| 119 | 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. | various | N | Pay |
| 108 | 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 | various | N | Pay |
| 105 | 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, Telegram, YouTube, Twitter (via Twitter paid API), CrowdTangle (Facebook & Instagram), CSV and JSON | N | Freemium |
| 89 | ArchiveSocial | ArchiveSocial automatically archives original social media posts as well as comments made by other users, allowing archive viewers to expand posts, comments, and pictures. The archive mirrors the original post, and has been used by agencies to comply with FOI requests and data archiving software-related research. | various | N | Pay |
| 80 | Twitter Audit | A tool used to check how many of your Twitter followers are real. | N | Freemium | |
| 73 | SteamID | The website can look up steam profiles, historic profiles or game information | Steam | N | Freemium |
| 43 | Affinio | Affinio is the marketing intelligence platform that is changing the way you relate to your consumers. | various | N | Pay |
| 39 | Dash Hudson | A social media management tool that offers social listening, audience insights and trends reporting | various | N | Pay |
| 38 | Disboard | Live updates of users active in a given Discord community; reviews communities based on Discord user preferences | Discord | N | Free |
| 31 | Meltwater Social (Sysomos) | Offering a comprehensive set of solutions that support the full spectrum of your advanced social analytics and management needs. | various | N | Pay |
| 28 | PSNprofiles | The website can search publicly viewable players, daily gameplay activity, country and other stats | Playstation Network | N | Free |
| 17 | Who posted what? | Whopostedwhat.com is a non public Facebook keyword search for people who work in the public interest. | N | Free | |
| 14 | KarmaDecay | Reverse image search of Reddit (beta) | N | Free | |
| 13 | Facebook Video Downloader | Downloads Facebook videos | N | Free | |
| 12 | Story Saver | Download Instagram Stories, Highlights and Videos Online Easily with one simple click. | N | Free | |
| 11 | Open Measures (formerly, Social Media Analysis Toolkit or SMAT) | Analyze & visualize harmful online trends such as hate, mis-, and disinformation online | Gab, Parler, 4chan, 8kun, Telegram, Gettr, Win Communities, Poal, Rumble, etc | N | Free |
| 10 | Facebook Video Downloader | Download Facebook Videos Online | N | Free | |
| 7 | Skopenow | Collecting and analyzing publicly available information from data sources including social media, the dark web, associated vehicles, court records, and contact data; Link Analysis feature generates a network and other visuals | various | N | Pay |
| 7 | Telemetr.io | The website povides Telegram channel analytics | Telegram | N | Freemium |
| 5 | Youtube Geofind | YouTube Geofind; three different search functions, location, topic, and channel. | Youtube | N | Free |
| 3 | Twitter Video Downloader | Download twitter videos & GIF from tweets | N | Free | |
| 3 | tlgrm.eu/channels | This website allows users to search for Telegram channels | Telegram | N | Free |
| 2 | Redective | Searches for profile and engagement information of a Reddit user | N | Free | |
| 1 | TelegramDB | Telegram channel search engine | Telegram | N | Free |
| 1 | Geogramint | Locates Telegram users and groups based on geographic location (only users opted into the nearby feature) | Telegram | Y | Free |
| 1 | Telepathy | The tool is described as the "Swiss army knife of Telegram tools," allowing analysts and researchers to archive Telegram chats (including replies, media content, comments and reactions), gather memberlists, lookup users by given location, analyze top posters in a chat, map forwarded messages, and more. | Telegram | Y | Free |
| metatargetr | The goal of metatargetr is to parse targeting information from the Meta Ad Targeting dataset as well as retrieve data from the Audience tab in the Meta Ad Library. | Y | Free | ||
| TikTokApi 6.2.0 | Unofficial TikTok API in python that can retrieve video, hashtag, user data | TikTok | Y | Free |
Note: The tools labelled as “Paid” were not independently tested by us.
Did we miss something? Social Media Research Toolkit Suggestion Form
In addition to curating the Social Media Research Toolkit, the Social Media Lab also develops social media data-collection and analysis tools to support social science research on online communities and online participation. Our flagship research tool, Communalytic, is used by thousands of students, educators and researchers around the world each year.