Research Guides: Analyzing Text Data: Social Media

Social Media Text Data

Social media posts and comments offer a rich data pool for text mining and analysis. Researchers typically access this content through the social media company's API or through third-party tools like Python that leverage these APIs.

Make a social media consultation appointment at GW

Responsible Use of Social Media Data

Before collecting research data, it is essential to consider the ethics of how you will find and report those data.

This document shares guidelines and considerations for the ethical use of social media, specifically Twitter/X, data.

Social media research ethical and privacy guidelines
Ethical social media research requires balancing the public good of the research with the impact on the creators of social media content. To help you consider how to conduct ethical social media research, we share these guidelines. These are general guidelines; there will be exceptions or cases that are not covered. The guidelines focus on the collecting, sharing, and publishing of social media data.

APIs

What is an API?

An API (Application Programming Interface) is a set of rules that allows software applications to communicate with each other, simplifying integration and data exchange. It enables developers to access specific functionalities or data from other software components.

Facebook (Meta) Graph API
Instagram API
Reddit API
Tumblr API
Twitter API
Note: Twitter's API is no longer free. See https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api
YouTube Data API

Tools for Obtaining Social Media Data

Out-of-the-Box Software

Social Media Research Toolkit
From their site: "The Social Media Research Toolkit is a list of 50+ social media research tools curated by researchers at the Social Media Lab at 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."
Social Media Archive @ ICPSR
From ICPSR: "SOMAR, part of ICPSR, a center within the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, is a new data archive dedicated to making social media data accessible and useful to researchers like never before. Its mission is to provide a platform that allows researchers to work with and analyze social media data, enabling them to study social media behavior, patterns, and trends."
Facepager
"Facepager was made for fetching public available data from YouTube, Twitter and other websites on the basis of APIs and webscraping."
Social Feed Manager
Social Feed Manager software was developed to support campus research about social media including Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo platforms. It can be used to track mentions of you or your articles and other research products for the previous seven days and on into the future.. Email libdata@gwu.edu to get started with Social Feed Manager or to schedule a consultation

Programmatic

Python

twarc
twarc is a command line tool and Python library for collecting and archiving Twitter JSON data via the Twitter API.
Tweepy
Easy-to-use Python library for accessing the Twitter API
socialreaper
Social media scraping / data collection library for Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Pinterest, and Tumblr APIs

streamR
Functions to access Twitter's filter, sample, and user streams, and to parse the output into data frames.
SocialMediaLab
SocialMediaLab is an R package that provides a suite of tools for collecting and constructing networks from social media data. It provides easy-to-use functions for collecting data across popular platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) and generating different types of networks for analysis.