Free social media search tool for brands, mentions, and trends

What is Free Social Search?

Free Social Search is a free social media search tool from Lumen by Talkwalker. It lets you search brands, products, campaigns, keywords, and hashtags across social media and the open web, then analyze mentions, engagement, sentiment, reach, trends, and influencers.


Think of it as a social media search engine with built-in analytics: instead of simply finding posts, it helps you understand the conversations and data behind them.


Use Free Social Search to:


• Search social media and the web for brand mentions, keywords, hashtags, and topics

• Monitor brand and competitor conversations

• Analyze consumer sentiment and engagement

• Find influencers and other accounts driving conversations

• Spot emerging trends and popular topics

• Filter results by location, language, date, time, and more

• Compare keywords, brands, campaigns, or competitors side by side


Free Social Search is a sliver of what Lumen can do. The full social listening platform goes much deeper, with more data sources, up to 13 months of historical data, real-time alerts, trend forecasting, custom dashboards, and more to help you understand what people are saying, why it matters, and what to do next.

What can you do with free social media search tools?

Free Social Search turns public social and online conversations into insights you can use for marketing, competitive research, brand monitoring, and product strategy.

Monitor competitors on social media

Track how competitors are performing across social media and the web. Compare brands based on mentions, engagement, sentiment, reach, and conversation trends to understand where competitors are gaining momentum and where opportunities exist for your brand.

Use social listening for product research

Customers are already sharing feedback about products, features, frustrations, and competitors online. Use social media search and listening data to uncover those conversations and identify recurring needs, complaints, and opportunities that can inform product development.

Monitor brand mentions and sentiment

See how people are talking about your brand and how that perception changes over time. Free Social Search combines brand mention monitoring with AI-powered sentiment analysis so you can understand conversation volume and whether mentions are positive, negative, or neutral.

You can also compare sentiment and mention trends with competitors to put your own brand performance in context.

Find social media trends

Discover topics, hashtags, and conversations gaining traction across social media and the web. Use real-time social search data to catch emerging trends early, identify relevant conversations in your industry, and see what is driving engagement.

Find influencers in your industry

Identify the people and accounts contributing to conversations around a brand, industry, campaign, or topic. Compare influencers based on metrics such as reach, engagement, mentions, and posting activity to find voices that may be relevant to your influencer marketing strategy.

What social media analytics do you get from Free Social Search?

Each search gives you a dashboard of social media analytics and listening data related to the keyword or topic you entered.

Mentions, engagement, sentiment, and reach

See the total number of results for your search along with engagement, sentiment, and potential reach. You can also see how these metrics have changed over the previous seven days.

Trending topics, hashtags, and themes

See the hashtags, phrases, and topics appearing most frequently within the conversation. This helps reveal what people are discussing alongside your brand or keyword and what may be driving the conversation.

Influencers and top authors

See which accounts are talking about your topic and compare them by reach, engagement, and post volume. You can also see how many unique authors are contributing to the conversation.

Audience demographics

Understand who is participating in the conversation with demographic insights such as age ranges, gender, languages, interests, and occupations, where data is available.

Geographic data

See where conversations are happening around the world. Geographic breakdowns show the countries and markets contributing the largest share of results.

Individual social media posts and mentions

Explore individual results for your search and view available metrics, including sentiment, estimated reach, engagement, likes, reposts, and follower counts. Sort results to surface recent or highly engaging conversations.

Filters and comparisons

Filter your results by criteria such as:

• Sentiment

• Media type

• Country or region

• Language

• Age

• Gender

• Audience type

You can also compare multiple searches side by side to analyze competing brands, keywords, campaigns, or topics.

Free Social Search can surface conversations from supported social networks and online sources, including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, X, YouTube, blogs, forums, news sites, and more.

Is Free Social Search easy to use?

Yes. Free Social Search works much like a search engine: enter a keyword or topic, and the tool finds relevant conversations across social media and the web.

How to use Free Social Search

Getting started takes three steps:

1. Fill out the form above with your contact details as well as the brand, keyword, product, campaign, or hashtag you want to search for.

2. Check your inbox for an email with a link to create your login.

3. Sign in to explore your search results and run additional searches.

Once you're in, you'll get a preview of Lumen's social listening capabilities, including social mentions, sentiment analysis, trends, influencers, engagement data, and more.

How can you get better social media search results?

Use Boolean search operators to make your social searches more precise.

Boolean searches let you combine keywords, exclude irrelevant results, search for exact phrases, and build more detailed queries. They’re especially useful for monitoring brands with common names, researching competitors, tracking campaigns, and finding specific conversations.

For example, searching Horizon alone could surface conversations about everything from photography to the event horizon. Searching Horizon AND (flight OR airline OR airport) helps zero in on conversations about the airline, even when people simply call the brand “Horizon.”

To track a specific customer issue, you can get even more precise: Horizon AND (flight OR airline OR airport) AND (cancelled OR delayed OR stranded OR refund)

Use these operators to cut through irrelevant results and build more targeted searches for brands, products, competitors, campaigns, and industry topics.

Want to go deeper? Learn more in our guide to Boolean search operators or use Hootsuite’s free Boolean search generator to instantly create queries.

What's the difference between this social media search tool and a social listening tool?

Social media search helps you find conversations, posts, mentions, hashtags, and topics related to a specific query.

Social listening goes further by analyzing those conversations at scale to identify trends, sentiment, audience insights, competitive changes, and patterns over time.

Free Social Search gives you a snapshot of both: you can search for conversations and use listening insights such as sentiment, engagement, influencers, and trends to understand what those conversations mean.

What's the difference between Free Social Search and Lumen by Talkwalker?

Free Social Search provides a limited preview of the social media monitoring and listening capabilities available in Lumen.

The free version includes seven days of data and a limited set of sources. Lumen's full social listening platform gives you access to broader data, deeper historical analysis, advanced monitoring, and ongoing research capabilities.

With Lumen, you get:

• More social, digital, and online data sources

• Up to 13 months of historical data on supported plans

• Trend forecasting to understand where conversations may be heading

• Custom dashboards for ongoing social monitoring

• Saved searches for brands, competitors, campaigns, and topics

• Advanced reporting and analysis

Use Free Social Search for a quick snapshot of online conversations, or request a demo to see the full Lumen social listening platform in action.