With the rapid and real-time data exchange through the internet, communicating and monitoring discussions and trends seemed easy. However, staying on trend and up-to-date with relevant events or simply getting in touch with people becomes difficult due to the data scattered across various social media platforms that we use.
This is where Search Engines for Social Networks can help you. It combines traditional search algorithms with online community filtering to provides collated search results from social networks and all over the web. Such network-agnostic search platforms allow users to discover other people’s profiles, view discussions on topics and gather necessary data for marketing and analytics.
Here are 5 of the most reliable web-based Social Network Search Engines
Social Mention
Social Mention is a simple social search engine that aggregates user-generated from various social networks and websites as well. It can retrieve results of phrases, events, and mentions. However, it will not show the specific social media profiles of a person. It will only show, as it names suggests, social mentions of topics and subjects.
It collates results from the web from 100 social networks, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram included. Social Mention is one of the simplest search engines and it makes the searching experience even easier as it is currently free to use.
Additionally, Social Mention also offers an API for developers and professionals to get a single stream of real-time search data. The API is freely available for personal or non-commercial use with a limit of 100 queries per day. For commercial usage, you might need to reach out to Social Mention directly.
Spokeo
Spokeo is designed specifically for finding people through either their name, phone, address, or email. It aggregates data from reliable and industry-leading data sources within seconds allowing you to see results from billions of records. This includes information from marketing surveys, mailing lists, government censuses, real estate listings, and business websites, and more.
Spokeo can help you identify people and know their background for security purposes, verify online sellers and merchants or find long lost friends or families. It also provides an enterprise solution for various industries like healthcare, legal, finance, real estate, non-profit, and e-commerce.
Basic search results like the name and location of the person you’re looking for are available through the web app for free. However, other details like full name, contact number, location history, full address, and email addresses will only be visible if you sign up and activate a paid account.
A Spokeo paid account starts at $19.95 a month but they also have a 3-month membership promo for $14.95.
Social-Searcher
Social-searcher is an engine that lets you find public mentions across different social networks and the world wide web. The engine primarily aims to serve companies that want to track their brands online for marketing purposes. It has an easy-to-use interface that you can use even without creating an account
Directly searching on the engine will provide results gathered from 11 valuable web sources: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, Dailymotion, and Vimeo.
It provides statistics on how many mentions a product got, the number of documented user, and sentiments expressed on the product. These data are all highly valuable for marketing and social analytics.
Other than the free search engine, Social-Searcher also offers premium Premium Brand Monitoring that comes with social mentions monitoring, data export, and social media monitoring API and an option to set email alerts.
You can choose among their 4 tier plans: Free, Basic (3.49 €/ month), Standard(8.49 €/month), and Professional(19.49 €/month). The packages vary in real-time search limit ranging from 100 to 800 per day. It also limits email alerts and other features like monitoring, saving posts, and web mentions.
Social Searcher: Google Social Search
Developed by Social-Searcher, Google Social Search is another great tool for retrieving an overview of mentions from common social network platforms. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, Pinterest, and Linkedin, where most people are active.
The dashboard retrieves custom results from the mainstream platforms. Marketers and other users can simply input a phrase of the topic they want to see and find out how the general public is talking about it.
They can also exclude results with specific terms by adding a minus sign before the word. The engine can retrieve the mentions with the exact words or phrases that you lookup by putting quotation marks on the beginning and end of your phrase.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is designed to be more of a business tool for marketers and brand managers. It specializes in keyword searches and providing content insights including mentions and engagements across social network platforms.
The engine helps find high-performing content as well as influencers that can fit the campaign. It also helps marketers strategize and monitor their campaigns and track comments and trends to respond to them rapidly.
BuzzSumo can be used for free, however, it can only show limited data. For the complete results and analytics, you will need to sign up for their paid plans. They offer monthly plans ranging from $99 to $499 per month. Packages vary on the retrievable data timeline, a number of users and alerts, projects, and items to handle and the number of feeds to monitor. Their plans are also available for a yearly subscription which can save you some money too.
The internet continuously evolves into a powerful medium of communication holding an enormous amount of data about almost anyone and anything. It holds the key to trends be it for the market, fashion, entertainment, and more as it also serves as a channel for reaching out to other people.
