InsightSocial

Audience Research from Social Media

InsightSocial helps you study an online community: run the free Chrome extension on a subreddit, a hashtag or a post's comments, and export every post and comment with author, date and engagement to Excel or Google Sheets.

Start Researching Free

See Audience Research in Action

One run, start to finish: open the page, click Scrape, export the file.

  1. 1Open any subreddit, on any sort
  2. 2Pick how many, click Scrape
  3. 3Export to Excel, CSV or Sheets

A worked example: what a subreddit complains about

You are building a budgeting app and want to know what people in r/personalfinance struggle with.

  1. Open the subreddit on Reddit (signed in), open the InsightSocial side panel, choose Posts and pick 500.
  2. Click Scrape. Each row is one post: title, body text, flair, author, score, upvote ratio, comment count and date.
  3. Export to Google Sheets. Sort by comment count to find the questions that started the longest discussions.
  4. Read the top 50 titles and tag each one with a theme in a new column, then count the themes.

For the detail behind a theme, open one of those posts and run Post and Comments: you get every comment and reply with its depth, so you can see who answered whom. The same approach works on a TikTok hashtag, a YouTube video's comments or a Hacker News thread.

The free plan includes 500 exported rows a month. On Pro, Ask your data answers plain-English questions about a finished run, such as "which complaints come up most?".

How to Do Audience Research

About two minutes from install to your first run. No coding or API keys.

  1. 1

    Pick the Community to Study

    Identify the subreddits, hashtags or comment threads where your research subjects discuss the topics you care about.

  2. 2

    Capture the Conversation

    Use InsightSocial to capture posts, comments, and engagement metrics into a structured dataset.

  3. 3

    Cluster by Topic

    Group posts by theme or keyword in your spreadsheet to see what the community actually talks about. On Pro, Ask your data can answer plain-English questions about the run.

  4. 4

    Quantify the Findings

    Measure topic frequency, engagement, and trend shifts over time. Turn impressions into evidence.

  5. 5

    Report

    Export to CSV or Excel for your analysis pipeline, slide deck, or research paper.

Quick Start Checklist

  • Chrome browser installed
  • Free InsightSocial account (sign in with Google or email)
  • About two minutes

What You Can Track

Community snapshots

Capture a subreddit, hashtag or comment section in one run

Comment threads

Comments with their replies, author and date

Engagement per post

See which posts and questions get the most response

Public profile data

Name, handle and profile link of each author

Repeat runs

Re-run the same subreddit or hashtag later and compare the two exports

CSV / Excel export

Drop into your analysis or BI tool

Frequently Asked Questions

Both. Market researchers, journalists, academic researchers and product analysts all use the same workflow: capture a community, study what's there, report the findings. The extension only reads what your own account can already see on the platform.

Recommended Tools

Use these scrapers to accomplish this use case

Reddit Subreddit Scraper

Open any subreddit and export up to 1,000 of its posts, or posts together with every comment under them

Try it free

Reddit Comment Scraper

Export every comment and reply in a Reddit thread, with the comment each one answers and how deep it sits

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TikTok Hashtag Scraper

Export the videos behind any TikTok hashtag, with creators, captions, sounds and engagement, to Excel or CSV

Try it free

YouTube Comments Scraper

Export the comments and replies on a YouTube video to Excel, CSV, JSON or Google Sheets

Try it free

Twitter Posts Scraper

Export tweets with likes, reposts, replies, views and media from Twitter/X

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TikTok Comments Scraper

Extract comments, replies, and engagement from TikTok videos

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LinkedIn Posts Scraper

Export posts and their authors from LinkedIn profiles, company pages and your feed

Try it free

Hacker News Comment Scraper

Turn a Hacker News thread into a dataset: every comment, every reply, and how deep in the tree it sits

Try it free
Free to scrape · exports free up to a monthly limit

Start Audience Research Today

Get InsightSocial Free

No credit card required · Works on Chrome, Edge, Brave