What is CrowdTangle?
CrowdTangle is a public insights tool from Meta that makes it easy to follow, analyze, and report on what’s happening with public content on social media.
What is CrowdTangle used for?
Organizations primarily use CrowdTangle to:
Follow. Easily follow public content across Facebook, Instagram and Reddit.
Analyze. Benchmark and compare performance of public accounts over time.
Report. Track referrals and find larger trends to understand how public content spreads on social media.
Some examples include:
Journalists using CrowdTangle Search to search across Facebook or Instagram for content relevant to their reporting.
Social media managers tracking their own account performance and comparing themselves to the competition in Intelligence.
TV producers broadcasting real-time streams of social posts related to breaking news events using Live Displays.
Fact-checkers identifying posts that contain misinformation.
Researchers analyzing trends across thousands of accounts over time and reporting on how information spreads.
You can also see specific examples within our case studies.
What data does CrowdTangle track?
CrowdTangle only tracks publicly available posts.
The kind of data CrowdTangle shares includes:
When something was posted.
The type of post (video, image, text).
Which Page or public account it was posted from, or which public group it was posted to.
How many interactions (e.g. likes, reactions, comments, shares) or video views it received.
Which other public Pages or accounts shared it.
CrowdTangle doesn't track:
Reach or impressions on a post.
Ephemeral content like stories.
Demographic information on users. CrowdTangle can tell you a particular post earned 1,000 likes, but it can't tell you who liked it, where they are from or their age.
Paid or boosted posts. CrowdTangle doesn’t differentiate between paid or organic engagement.
Any data or posts from private accounts, or accounts that have put location or age restrictions on their content.
What accounts does CrowdTangle track?
CrowdTangle tracks influential public accounts and groups across Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, including all verified users, profiles, and accounts like politicians, journalists, media and publishers, celebrities, sports teams, public figures and more. CrowdTangle also can track 7 days of public Twitter data via CrowdTangle Search and our Chrome Extension. CrowdTangle does not track any private accounts.
CrowdTangle’s database currently includes:
Facebook: 7M+ Facebook pages, groups, and verified profiles. This includes all public Facebook pages with more than 50K likes (automated via API), all public Facebook groups with 95k+ members, all US-based public groups with 2k+ members, and all verified profiles.
Instagram: 2M+ public Instagram accounts. This includes all public Instagram accounts with more than 50K followers, as well as all verified accounts.
Reddit: ~20K+ of the most active sub-reddits. Built and maintained in partnership with Reddit.
You can see a table that summarizes the percentage of Facebook Pages active in the last 28 days that CrowdTangle tracks, updated monthly here.
Can I get access to CrowdTangle?
Anyone can immediately access our popular public features, the Link Checker Chrome Extension, which allows users to see who has shared a link across social media, as well as our public hub of Live Displays, which give a real-time view of what’s happening across Facebook, Instagram and reddit on specific topics.
If you think your organization already has access to CrowdTangle, but you don’t have a login, please reach out to support@crowdtangle.com.
Does CrowdTangle cost money?
All of CrowdTangle is completely free.
What are some of CrowdTangle’s core products?
Here are CrowdTangle core products and what they do:
CrowdTangle Search. Search helps users find and discover content across social media. Users can search for a keyword, hashtag, or URL and filter by social platform, country, language, post type, timeframe, and more. Search will also look across all text on images, making it possible to search for memes. It also provides visualizations for how keywords have trended over time across Facebook and Instagram.
Live Displays. Live Displays are real-time streams of public posts, filtered to show only the most relevant content around important topics and events. CrowdTangle publishes public Live Displays, available to anyone, around major news events so that organizations can keep track of what’s happening across social platforms moment to moment. CrowdTangle users can also build their own Live Displays to make available to their teams.
Intelligence. Intelligence lets users compare multiple public Pages, accounts, or subreddits against each other. It’s used to help identify performance trends over time with easy to understand graphs and charts.
Notifications. Organizations can set up email and Slack notifications to streamline their social monitoring. They can be immediately alerted when posts from certain accounts are going viral, get weekly emails of top posts among a group or pages, or get notified daily of all new posts relevant to their team.
Dashboards. Each team has a CrowdTangle dashboard. From there they can create custom lists of public accounts and groups that they want to keep track of.
CrowdTangle Link Checker Chrome Extension. Our Chrome Extension is available to the public and lets anyone see all the times a URL has been shared by a public account, who shared it, and what they said. This is an easy way to get greater transparency into what accounts are driving conversation around certain articles. Get the Chrome Extension here.
How should I cite CrowdTangle in an article?
When referencing CrowdTangle data in an article, you can say “Data from CrowdTangle, a public insights tool owned and operated by Facebook.” Please reference this article to make sure you are describing CrowdTangle data accurately, as well as for longer form citations.
What is the history of CrowdTangle being acquired by Facebook?
CrowdTangle was created to give greater insight into what’s happening on social media. Initially it was built to help organize social causes on Facebook. While the first version as a whole didn’t take off, one feature did: the ability to show what social content overperformed on Facebook Pages.
CrowdTangle expanded to include other social platforms and became an important way for newsrooms and media organizations to monitor performance and identify emerging stories. Facebook acquired CrowdTangle in November, 2016, made the tool free, and expanded access from 300 media partners to more than 10,000, including global sports leagues, local newspapers, digital publishers, music labels, celebrity accounts, and more.
Starting in 2019, CrowdTangle added research, academic and fact-checking partners, and built tools to help these partners study how public content spreads across Facebook and Instagram. By creating easy-to-use products, CrowdTangle has become a way for outside organizations to have greater transparency into what’s happening on Facebook and Instagram. The hope is that a greater shared understanding around how public content spreads will shape the broader online conversation, and help make information on social media safer, more reliable, and more accurate.
How do I reach out for more questions or press inquiries?
For any questions, please contact support@crowdtangle.com.