Social Media

Acquiring data from social media sites can be very valuable and important for certain research topics. However, because of the relative infancy of social media as a platform, the process of acquiring data can be a little tricky.

• There are many tools that you can use to trawl through certain social media platforms however there is no consensus on which are the most effective.
  • Also note that some tools require an understanding of certain coding languages (such as R, Python, etc.)
• A lot of the guides written on searching social media are at least a couple of years old. Since social media is constantly changing, consider whether their advice is still relevant.

CeR run a 'hacky hour'. Slides and notes for past sessions including 'Social media data scraping and wrangling tips and tricks' are at: https://uoa-eresearch.github.io/HackyHour/tips-tricks-sessions/   See also their hacky hour:https://uoa-eresearch.github.io/HackyHour/ For additional help and advice contact CeR.

Please make sure you have ethics approval for any projects requiring you to use social media data.

The following are a selection of guides and resources. Be aware that the information may be dated as this is a fast evolving area.

• The University of Queensland library has a useful guide Search social media.

• Social media research toolkit 'curated by researchers at the Social Media Lab, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, Canada. The kit features tools that have been used in peer-reviewed academic studies. Many tools are free to use and require little or no programming'.

• Social feed manager from GW Libraries (George Washington University) 'open source software that harvests social media data and web resources from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weib'

• Where to get twitter data for academic research 2017 blog post from Justin Littman at George Washington University.

• Google Social Search. 'search for content in social networks in real-time and provides deep analytics data. Users can search without logging in for publicly posted information on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, Dailymotion and Vimeo.'
  
  
• The NZ National Library is Archiving twitter about Covid19 in New Zealand.