Is your social media lookup turning up nothing?
Most of us can’t remember a day without scrolling, sharing, snapping or streaming - and if you’re an OSINT investigator, searching. Social media is how we express ourselves, relate to the modern world around us, and connect with the people who matter. This means while some of us freely showcase who we are online to cultivate our digital personas, others choose to hide - for legitimate reasons - behind privacy settings or secondary profiles. While creating a ‘finsta’ might be a great way to shield your unfiltered profile from prying eyes, it’s bad news for OSINT. If you’re conducting an investigation, looking to enhance your organisation’s cybersecurity, or simply looking to verify an identity, uncovering and unlocking these hidden accounts can be intimidating.
Until now. Armed with the right tools and social media lookup techniques, OSINT makes it possible to unearth those elusive profiles. In this article, we’ll explore how social media lookup works for hidden profiles, effective strategies for tracking hidden accounts, and the critical role OSINT tools - like OSINT Industries - play in the process.
What is Social media Intelligence (SOCMINT)?
You need to know all about social media lookup on hidden profiles if you’re going to effectively conduct SOCMINT. Social media lookup is one of the essentials of SOCMINT, or Social Media Intelligence: the process of gathering, analysing, and interpreting data from social media platforms to verify identities and understand trends, behaviours and more. Basically, SOCMINT is OSINT with social media. SOCMINT, including social media lookup, has three primary professional uses: threat analysis, cybersecurity and crisis management. Law enforcement officers and agencies use SOCMINT - to find suspects and gather evidence. In crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the U.S. Capitol riot in 2021, social media posts and photos were crucial ammunition to identify the culprits and push back against misinformation and disorder.
What is Social Media Lookup?
The key tool in your SOCMINT toolbox? Social media lookup. This phrase refers to methods for seeking out profiles and accounts on social media platforms - using publicly available information. If done effectively and with the right tool, social media lookups will help you to understand your subject’s online presence across different platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and many many more.
Most people don’t take excessive measures to conceal their profiles beyond making them ‘private’ - which doesn’t prevent identity verification. However, unlike open or named ‘private’ profiles that are easy to find, some profiles can be anonymous; these users have succeeded in making their accounts tricky to track. These hidden profiles could have more intense privacy settings enabled, show no identifying images and details, or use pseudonyms and aliases instead of real names to really sever the link between ‘finsta’ and Insta. These situations don’t have to thwart your tried-and-tested OSINT investigation techniques.
Why Look Up Hidden Social Profiles?
So who might need to find a profile that’s been concealed from prying eyes? Recruiters and employers might need to vet potential employees; law enforcement (of course) need to investigate and monitor suspects and evidence. Marketers and bosses could need to research customer preferences, target ads, or evaluate influencers for partnerships. Private investigators use social media lookup often too - even to find missing persons - and cybersecurity experts can pinpoint potential online threats on socials before the danger bleeds into real life. There are many reasons to search for hidden profiles, including:
- Background checks: Background checks on social media can reveal important aspects of an individual’s life and character.
- Cybersecurity: People hide profiles for a reason. Hidden profiles might be indicative of malicious activities like cyberstalking, identity theft, or social engineering attacks.
- Investigations: Law enforcement and private investigators can track down people or discover details related to crimes or fraud online.
- Reputation management: Social media lookup can keep tabs on what’s being said about you or your business online, and learn whether there are fake accounts impersonating them.
Two Approaches to Finding Hidden Social Profiles
Finding hidden profiles and accounts is easy with the right approach. Let’s check out two: the hard way, a.k.a. manual search, and the easy way, a.k.a. OSINT tools and automation - the best of these tools being OSINT Industries’ platform.
Manual Social Media Lookup
One thing to remember about manual OSINT searches is just how time-consuming they are. If you’re choosing to do social media lookup the old-fashioned way, be prepared to pay with your time for your choice to eschew the great OSINT tools on the market. This is especially the case with hidden profiles, but that’s not to say manual searches can’t still be effective. Here’s a couple hands-on methods that rely on publicly available information, and make use of manual cross-referencing to turn OSINF into OSINT.
- Reverse Image Search: One way to find hidden profiles is through reverse image searches. By uploading a photo of the person in question - or an image that you think may feature on their hidden profile - to search engines like Google, or specialized tools like TinEye or Duplichecker, you can scan the web for other instances of that image. Sometimes, these reverse image searches reveal the hidden or pseudonymous profiles you’re looking for.
- Username Check Across Platforms: Even if they’ve come up with an alias, most people use the same or similar usernames across multiple platforms. If your subject’s one of them, try searching on different social platforms for any usernames you know they’ve used. For instance, a Twitter username may bring up an Instagram profile with the same moniker.
- Manual Email or Phone Number Search: More fun with the search bar! Most socials (such as Facebook) allow you to search for accounts by email or phone number directly on the platform itself. If you have either of these scraps of information, you may be able to find the rest of the picture: any hidden accounts linked to them. Of course, this is no use if you don’t have an email or phone number for your subject, and you’ll have to search every platform individually, but it’s a great trick if you’re in possession of either.
- Friend/Follower Lists and Mutuals: If you know that the person interacts with certain individuals on other platforms, you can check friend lists or followers of mutual connections to locate their hidden profiles; best of all, a lot of people will follow or befriend their own duplicitous accounts. This method works particularly well on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Using OSINT Tools for Social Media Lookup
If you want some of the hard work of social media lookup done for you, OSINT tools are automated systems that gather and analyze information from the web - so you don’t need to get your hands dirty. OSINT tools speed up the lookup process for hidden social media profiles significantly, by scraping all publicly available data and helping you to analyze patterns.
- Maltego is a widely used OSINT tool that allows for deep investigation of online entities. It’s got powerful graphing capabilities that trace connections between email addresses, phone numbers, usernames, and social media profiles across the web; perfect to help you find that missing piece. (Best of all, OSINT Industries’ top subscriber tier offers a Maltego integration!)
- OSINT Industries is an OSINT platform designed for both the seasoned analyst and the curious newcomer. We think of our 100% accurate, user-friendly OSINT platform as a digital magnifying glass on a world of insights. You can do hours of manual research in seconds on our platform. Simply search a selector (more on this later) and see all the data in one place - including, often, social media profiles that you’d have missed manually or were hidden to the naked eye!
Google Dorking 101: How Can Search Engines Help?
Let’s talk about search engines. Sites like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo are probably where you’d first think to find information that leads to hidden profiles, and your first thought wasn’t wrong. Here’s how they can help with social media lookup, via a process called ‘dorking’.
Advanced Search Operators
Advanced operators are techniques and phrases that help users to refine their search queries, something vital for effective social media lookup. To locate hidden social media profiles, you’ll need to narrow down search results to only the most relevant entries. Here’s how.
- Using ‘site:’: You can search within a specific website (i.e. social platforms) by using the ‘site:’ operator. Searching ‘Facebook.com [sneaky person’s name]’ will only return results from Facebook that feature your elusive subject. You can also use this technique to search other platforms like Instagram or Twitter, or anywhere you think you’ve got a hot lead on a profile.
- Quotation Marks: Inputting quotation marks around names or usernames - or any specific phrase - will tell the search engine to look for exact matches only. This is useful when searching for a specific person with a nonspecific name that commonly occurs. For example, searching for "John Doe" rather than plain John Doe will return results that only include the exact phrase "John Doe”: not ‘John McDoe’ or ‘Johnny Avocadoes’.
- Combining Operators: You can mix and match. Combine multiple advanced search operators to refine your results and hunt those hidden profiles. For example, if you’re looking for John Doe’s Twitter (X) profile and you know he’s from Dorchester, you could search ‘site:x.com “John Doe” Dorchester.’
If you’re using OSINT Industries, any results that appear from an OSINT search will feature a button that does advanced selector searching for you. Simply click to dork an email or username found during your investigation with all these search engine techniques.
Why Use OSINT Industries' Social Media Lookup Tool to Find Hidden Profiles?
Manual methods - and most general OSINT tools - can be effective, but they have limitations. This is where a specialized tool like OSINT Industries’ Social Media Lookup comes into play. We designed the OSINT Industries platform specifically to simplify and enhance the process of OSINT investigation; finding hidden social media profiles while saving vital investigator effort and time. Thousands of law enforcement agencies, cybersecurity orgs and media corporations worldwide take advantage of our advanced features and high accuracy to find what’s hidden. Here’s why the professionals use our tool.
Comprehensive Data Mining
OSINT Industries’ tool excels at retrieving an impressive amount of intel, including all hidden accounts. It’s not uncommon to find a hidden profile immediately in a search. We achieve this comprehensive data retrieval by pulling from our 500+ platform modules that present a vast variety of data points, from Facebook to Duolingo, and even international socials like OKRu.
The data our platform can help you access includes:
- Confirmation of account/profile existence
- Account and profile links (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Pictures
- Videos
- Personal details
- Connections and followers
- Last-seens and historic activity
- Aliases
- Phone numbers
- Comments and interactions
- Geographical data (GeoINT), e.g. locations a subject has stayed or frequented
- Reviews and ratings
- Data breaches
- Account activity, e.g. Strava runs
And more. We present a uniquely granular view of a search subject’s digital presence, including what they’ve tried to keep hidden.
User-Friendly Interface and Graphics
Our platform is perfect for both the seasoned OSINT analyst and the first-time searcher: professionals and amateurs alike. Unlike many OSINT tools that require technical expertise, OSINT Industries’ intuitive interface is designed for ease of use.Our users can easily input basic information and allow the tool to perform the heavy lifting - leaving you free to cross-reference the data on our comprehensive profile cards, timeline feature or geospatial map.
Advanced Analytics
Speaking of graphics, our charts and maps streamline the analytical portion of OSINT investigation. You can even export and download your findings in your chosen format: JSON, EXCEL, PDF or DOC. This is especially useful when conducting social media lookup for the purposes of tracking someone who uses different usernames, photos, or partial information across various (fake) accounts.
100% Accuracy, in Real Time
Manually searching for hidden profiles can take hours or even days. OSINT Industries’ tool takes seconds, and our 100% accuracy never misses. We don’t tolerate false positives, and we’ve got unique technology that makes our platform the best option for social media lookup to find hidden profiles.
The OSINT Industries platform gathers info in real-time. Our ‘sources scanned’ widget indicates sophisticated algorithms scouring the internet exactly at the moment of your search. Accessing intel in real-time means we’ve got no need for traditional databases: the ‘middle-men’ that rely on saving and periodically updating information. By cutting out databases - and simply displaying the most current data available - we’ve eliminated the problem of data being out-of-date.
Conclusion
Once upon a time, finding hidden social media profiles was an impossible task. Thanks to social media lookups with OSINT, it’s easy. Using sophisticated OSINT tools like those offered by OSINT Industries, you can uncover even the most elusive social media profiles in a way that we could only dream about a decade ago. Isn’t it amazing how Open-Source Intelligence brings us into the future?
