Social media accounts are a key element in research. Assuming we know the username (s) of our target, we can use a variety of tools in order to trace accounts across multiple platforms:
- Namecheckup.com: This site is actually meant to allow users to check the availability of social media usernames and domain names across various platforms. Nevertheless, it’s great for searching multiple platforms all at once. Here’s an example searching “Beyonce”:
You can click the grey boxes and the existing profile will open.
- Social searcher: a social search engine that allows you to search users and explore mentions across Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Vimeo and Dailymotion. You can filter search results by social network and export data in CSV. Here’s an example searching “Trump”:
- Peekyou: another people search engine that lets you search by full name /username.
- A bit more technical, but allows for more customization is Sherlock: a Python-based command-line tool that allows you to trace users across 306 social media platforms. To install it, follow the steps on the GitHub page. Here’s a tutorial: https://youtu.be/HrqYGTK8-bo
Finally, in order to search in multiple usernames search engines, you can use our Market-Researcher Chrome extension. Just mark the username > right-click > Person by Username and a pop-up with multiple user search tools will open for you to compare.
Note: the search results can be misleading at times (since there are fake accounts/users with similar usernames etc.). It’s important to verify the results we get by opening the profiles and making sure they really belong to our Target.
