Apply for access to the Twitter historical archive through a new (as of Feb 2021) Academic Research API. Available to faculty, graduate students, and others who are affiliated with an academic institution and have a clearly defined research need. For questions about using the API reach out to dash@umn.edu.

CrowdTangle is a public insights tool from Facebook to help you follow, analyze, and report on what’s happening on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms. Faculty, PhD students, and post-docs can apply for free academic access. Email dash@umn.edu for more information.

Software for fetching public available data from Facebook, Twitter and other JSON-based APIs.

Open source software that harvests social media data and web resources from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo.

Use TAGS to setup and automate collection of tweets into Google Sheets. Collects data for the last 6-9 days (based on limitations of the Twitter API).

Chrome browser plug-in for getting Twitter and public Facebook data for use in NVivo.

Netlytic is a community-supported text and social networks analyzer that can automatically summarize and visualize public online conversations on social media sites. It is made for researchers by researchers, no programming/API skills required.

Free social media data, analytics and visualization tools for researchers at all levels of expertise. Includes SMILE, an open-source social media analytics tool to collect and analyze data from Twitter and Reddit; and BAE, a Brand Analytics Environment to gain insight into how individuals and groups may interact with brands and various organizations. [BAE requires an IBM Cloud Account login.]

A list of social media research tools curated by researchers at the Social Media Lab (Ryerson University). The kit features tools that have been used in peer-reviewed academic studies.

A brief overview of issues with Twitter data, as well as a directory of free tools for collecting data from Twitter.