Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, TikTok and other online platforms have created whole new avenues for research. "Social Media Analysis" can be seen as the intersection of text analysis and network analysis. The "text" is often in the form of discussions, and may include images, emoji, and other media. The "media" is often structured in the form of a network, where the relationships between people and ideas become the focus of study. Information presented here is geared towards helping you collect social media data, and includes tools tailored for analyzing and visualizing data from specific social media platforms. For a more in-depth look at data sources you may want to use for your research, see our Data Services guide.
Related techniques: Text Analysis, Qualitative Analysis, Web Scraping
This technique is part of the Analysis activity.

free plan limited to 500 pages/month | data collection only | web-based, using browser extension
free plan limited to 10k records per export | data collection only | Windows only
free | data collection only | programming required if not using existing data sets

free | Windows, Mac and Linux downloads | easy to learn