Some of you may remain skeptical about downloading the Snapchat app for your investigations. If this is the case, Somesnaps, aka, snapyfox.com is a site that categorizes Snapchat users based on tags. It is not affiliated with Snapchat. The search engine allows you to search a hashtag or directly by username.
If an account is found, Somesnaps will also aggregate other social media accounts affiliated to the Snapchat user, including Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. We played around with this tool, and it seems to work for more popular accounts and hashtags. This can be helpful if your subject has a large following, or if you are categorizing individuals using a hashtag for an organization.
Somesnaps promotes itself as a curator of popular content. On a recent visit, the Editor Picks Popular Snapchat Users offered these folks up:
We clicked on Willem Kossen and arrived at a page dedicated to his online persona. We learn that his Snapchat handle is @wjkwjkwjk, he has a Twitter account @wkossen, and he uses the hashtags #Music #Youtube #Social Media #Technology.
Upon entering Kossen’s #Technology into the search bar, we arrived at a list of Snapchat users with “Technology” in their username (very few!) and a list of snapchat hashtags that include “technology” in their tag. From there, we can click on one of the hyperlinked tags and view all the people who have used that particular hashtag in Snapchat.
This tool could be particularly useful if you are tracking a protest from afar and want to identify people using the same hashtag in Snapchat to communicate in real-time.
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