For the Enter Handle box you enter the persons social media username or handle and click Add Profile button below to associate this handle with your subject. 

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Below is an example of how you locate the social media username from the URL string of Twitter.  

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Twitter Profile URL: 

 

 https://twitter.com/TheRealFerretly

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Username/Handle you enter:

 

 TheRealFerretly

 

NOTE:  When entering a new subject you can associate their username or handle by entering the entire URL string into the social media platform additional properties for the subject.  

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Searching for Social Media Profiles

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Ferretly provides you with the ability to enter a person’s name and return a set of candidate profiles for a specific social media channel.  When you add a profile to a subject, the subject name is filled into the handle text input by default.  If you click on Find Profiles, Ferretly will use the subject’s name to perform the search. You can override the default search by typing your search criteria into the box and clicking on Find Profiles.

 

Ferretly will return the first 25 profiles that best match your criteria. If you are uncertain of the profile, you can click on the handle name in one of the profile cards to view the profile in the source social media platform.  Note, clicking on the profile picture in the search results will provide a zoomed view of that person's profile picture.

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Note:  You can enter a profile handle or a name into the handle text box to search or simply validate.  For example, if you already know the person’s handle, you can type it into the box and click on Add Profile to return the profile card and verify that the handle you entered is for the correct person or subject.

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When you enter a person’s name, be as specific as possible.  For example, you might have a subject whose name is Deborah Johnson, however, they may have used Debbie Johnson when they created their social media account.  You may have to experiment with various name combinations in order to find the correct social media profile.  

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You can also enter a middle name or middle initial in your search.  For example, Donald J. Trump.  

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Some Search Rules to keep in mind:

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1. For Facebook, you can enter more than just the name, you can specify location e.g., a city, business name or school.  If the user provided this information in the public profile then Ferretly will return all profiles which match any of the strings you specify.
    

2. For Twitter, you can enter quotes around the name to obtain an exact match e.g., “John Smith”. If you remove the quotes, then Ferretly will return broad matches on the name such as Jonathon Smith or even other names that have “John Smith” in the profile description. You can also specify a location e.g., John Smith Boston.  In this case, Ferretly will do a broad match on all of the terms.  If you want to be more precise you can enter “John Smith” near:”Boston, MA” within:15mi.  This will only return names with “John Smith” that within 15 miles of Boston.
    

3. For Instagram, Ferretly will return a phrase match on the name.  For example, John Smith will only return profiles that have a name or handle name of “John Smith” or “John Smith Anderson”.  

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Searching based on Location

 

For Twitter, you have the ability to specify a city to narrow the search results.  Ferretly does not support location parameters in search for Instagram. This requires that you enter specific syntax in the handle search. For example, let’s say you are looking for Deborah Johnson who lives in Boston.  The following is the appropriate syntax for Twitter:

 

"Deborah Johnson" near:"Boston,MA" or from:"Deborah" OR from:"Johnson" near:"Boston, MA" within:15mi

 

Note: For Twitter, you must use quotes around the name and the city, state.

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