Social Feed Manager

GW Libraries can collect social media data for research, archiving, and academic purposes. We developed the Social Feed Manager software to support campus research about social media including Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo platforms.

To get started with Social Feed Manager, schedule a social media data consultation or email libsocialmedia@gwu.edu.

Research support

If you’re studying Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, or Sina Weibo, you can collect data for your research using Social Feed Manager.

Social Feed Manager is hosted and run by GW Libraries and harvests data and websites from free public sources provided by the platforms. You can receive data in several formats, including CSV, Excel, and JSON. Social Feed Manager is open source (on Github) and you may run your own instance if you prefer. (We can help with that, too!) If needed, we can recommend additional strategies for collecting social media.

Recently published research using data from SFM:

• Audrey Alexander, Digital Decay: Tracing Change Over Time Among English-Language Islamic State Sympathizers on Twitter
• Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless, Women on the Run: Gender, Media, and Political Campaigns in a Polarized Era.
• Caitlin Roper, Targeting Persuadable Voters Through Social Media: The Use of Twitter in The 2015 UK General Election.
• Bailey Mohr, Campaign Messaging & Engagement on Twitter in the 2014 U.S. Senate Elections, supported by the Manheim-Sterling Undergraduate Research Prize.

Instructional support

If your class is studying Twitter or other social media platforms, we can give a class session on how to use SFM to collect data and provide data for academic use.

Grant support

We can provide advice for your grant proposal where it involves gathering social media data:

• Working with you to set up Social Feed Manager to query platforms and collect data.
• Providing sample datasets.
• Advising on purchasing datasets or firehose access from a third-party reseller.

Contact us

To get started with Social Feed Manager, schedule a social media data consultation or email libsocialmedia@gwu.edu.

About the project

Social Feed Manager was funded by a three-year National Historical Publications and Records (NHPRC) Innovation grant. Under this grant, we released a new version of SFM that allows students and researchers to directly develop their own social media collections. Our current grant also supported sharing recommendations around collection development and metadata for social media collections and archives. More information about the project.

SFM was initially funded by an IMLS Sparks! Innovation Grant and supported the development of the first version of Social Feed Manager.

Additional resources on Social Feed Manager

• Social Media Data (research guide)
• Social Feed Manager documentation
• Project site, with blog posts and resources about our work
• Social Feed Manager Project Background (blog post)
• Informing Social Feed Manager at GW (blog post)

Data management and dataset resources

• Data Management Guide: Data Management Plan Tool access, metadata resources
• Social Science Data Resources