Hi, reporters! We’re in the TikTok age. It just got here a couple years ago, and will be gone in another few, but it’s here for now.
The problem is, TikTok is a beast to search. It has a native search function, of course, but usually what I’m looking for isn’t in a handy hashtag or caption – it’s text pasted on the video, or even describing the content itself.
There are surprisingly few tools available to search TikTok. Fewer than Facebook and Twitter had in their heydays, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps because it’s primarily video content, and there’s so much of it? In any case, I have a few suggestions:
Bellingcat’s TikTok hashtag analysis toolset searches posts by hashtag. It’s a Python library, so you do have to have Python installed and be able to use the Command Line to use it.
ExportComments.com is a simple site that does what it says on the tin. They added TikTok to their repertoire, so if you have a direct link to a TikTok post, you can export up to 100 comments from it.
But the most interesting, to me, is Google Reverse Image Search. It returns TikTok posts even if they just show that image for a split second (which is another challenge of the platform). I confess I have no idea how accurate this one is, because I don’t know how much of TikTok they are indexing.
But that is what I’ve got! Do you have a tool for searching TikTok? Let me know and I can share with the group!