[Air-L] Searching Instagram/Twitter by keyword and narrowing to specific focus

[Aysenur Ataman]

Dear Natalie,

I do not know any tool that would allow you to combine the two parameters (hashtag and geographical location) when searching for posts on Instagram. I collected data pre Dec 1st 2018 API change via Netlytic and am not sure Netlytic' access is still valid but I do recommend checking that out.

Steps I recommend your friend takes:

1) It is very crucial to think carefully about what hashtag will be useful for your research. Better it is not a BIG hashtag.

2) Collect metadata using the hashtag(s) and dates as parameters.

3) Use longitude-latitude to detect locations yourself. Will be much more reliable that way.

I played with scraping the number of followers after these steps and see if I can come up with a formula to make sense of number of likes and comments under each post but then I decided with the bots and fake accounts no finding will be reliable. So I gave up… If anyone has thoughts and solutions for that I would be glad to hear.

Best,
Ayşenur

_____________________________________________
Ayşenur Benevento
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Abdullah Gül University
On 28 Mar 2019 05:38 +0300, Natalie Rock <drnatalierock at gmail.com>, wrote:
Community:

This is a question from a colleague. Its out of my wheelhouse but probably
not yours!

He is interested in tracking dialogue on Twitter and Instagram about
renewable energy, especially in light of the Green New Deal, but with the
search focused on change makers (i.e. those over a certain number of
followers).

He has set up an account with Keyhole but their searches are not useful.
Keyhole doesn't allow you to specify the search by geography; nor does it
allow you to indicate which profiles to search. When he searches "renewable
energy" (keyword and hashtag) he gets hundreds of thousands of returns, but
many are unrelated to his focus. So, do you know a platform that enables:

-searching/scraping by geography
-specifying searches according to number of followers

and which is the same or below Keyhole's current price range of $370/month?

Thank you!
Natalie
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