Social Media API Search Guidelines
When searching through social media APIs, having clear guidelines helps you get accurate and relevant results. This guide covers best practices for building effective queries, filtering data, and staying within usage limits.
General Guidelines
- Avoid special characters
- Use lowercase, and remove symbols (e.g like #, @, ', and -) or accents for better matching and results.
- Use normal terms like "loreal" and "anti aging" instead of "L'Oreal" or "anti-aging"
- Keep your queries simple
- Most platforms prefer simple keyword searches to complicated ones.
- Break large queries into smaller, more targeted ones for better results.
- Platform-specific behavior
- Our APIs return data based on what the source platform allows, so results may vary depending on those limits.
- Always test first - platforms behave differently, so start with small test queries before scaling up.
Platform-Specific Guidelines
YouTube
- Supports keyword search
- Supports basic logic like AND, OR, and parentheses.
- Complex searches are valid, but they often return fewer results.
- Use simple, focused keywords for better results.
Examples:
✅ "skincare review", "best serum for dry skin"
✅ ("skincare" OR "beauty") AND ("review" OR "test") → This is allowed by the system
⚠️ But: "skincare review" generally performs better
TikTok
- Supports hashtag and keyword search
- Supports complex queries, but results may be inconsistent.
- Using simple keywords, like hashtags, works best.
Examples:
✅ "neutrogena skincare", "antiagingroutine"
❌ "neutrogena" AND "cleanser" AND "routine"
X (formerly Twitter)
- Allows account scraping - you can enter a specific account URL to collect posts from their feed.
- Best support for boolean logic (AND, OR, parentheses).
- Works well with simple and moderately complex queries.
- Avoid special characters—queries with @, #, or punctuation tend to perform poorly.
Example:
✅ "neutrogena cleanser"
❌ "@neutrogena" AND "cleanser"
✅ "neutrogena" AND "cleanser" → technically valid
⚠️ But: "neutrogena cleanser" generally performs better
- We only scrape public content and public posts
- You can discover Company Facebook pages in different regions and maximize the coverage of data (It only works for logged-in users )
Examples:
✅ "https://www.facebook.com/bbc/"
✅ "https://www.facebook.com/Zara"