Social Media Finder — Username Search & Profile Lookup

Social Links Search — Find Social Media Profiles by Name, Username, Email or Phone

Cross-platform social profile discovery. Enter a person's name, username, email, or phone number and get back confirmed profile links across 15+ major platforms — LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, GitHub, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Telegram, Medium, Substack, Quora, Twitch, Snapchat.

Use cases

• OSINT / identity verification — confirm a person's online presence from a single identity signal
• Recruiting — from a candidate's name find their GitHub, LinkedIn, and social profiles in one run
• Fraud detection — cross-check an email or username across platforms to detect fake/synthetic identities
• Sales enrichment — given a prospect's name, discover their LinkedIn and social touch-points
• Brand / reputation monitoring — find all accounts associated with a real person or handle

How it works

Two-layer approach, no external API key required:

1. Direct URL probe — for username-shaped queries, builds canonical profile URLs per platform (twitter.com/<handle>, github.com/<handle>, etc.) and probes them via HTTPS. A valid 200 response on a real profile pattern = confirmed hit (high confidence).
2. DuckDuckGo SERP fallback — for name / email / phone queries (and uncovered platforms), runs a site-scoped DuckDuckGo search ("Elon Musk" site:linkedin.com OR site:twitter.com) and validates URLs from the results. No API key, works anonymously.

Sample output

[
  {
    "platform": "Twitter / X",
    "platform_id": "twitter",
    "profile_url": "https://x.com/elonmusk",
    "display_name": "Elon Musk",
    "username": "elonmusk",
    "match_confidence": "high",
    "source": "direct_probe",
    "parse_confidence": "probe_200",
    "query": "elonmusk"
  },
  {
    "platform": "GitHub",
    "platform_id": "github",
    "profile_url": "https://github.com/elonmusk",
    "display_name": "Elon Musk",
    "username": "elonmusk",
    "match_confidence": "high",
    "source": "direct_probe",
    "parse_confidence": "probe_200",
    "query": "elonmusk"
  }
]

Input fields

Field	Type	Default	Description
query	string	—	Name, username (with or without @), email, or phone to search
platforms	list	all (15+)	Restrict to specific platforms. Options: twitter, linkedin, instagram, tiktok, github, reddit, youtube, facebook, pinterest, telegram, medium, substack, quora, twitch, snapchat
maxResults	integer	10	Max profiles to return (1–50)
proxyConfiguration	proxy	RESIDENTIAL	Apify proxy settings. RESIDENTIAL recommended
useSerpFallback	boolean	true	Also run DuckDuckGo SERP for higher recall

Supported platforms

LinkedIn · Twitter/X · Instagram · TikTok · GitHub · Reddit · YouTube · Facebook · Pinterest · Telegram · Medium · Substack · Quora · Twitch · Snapchat

💰 Pricing & how we compare

Pay-per-result (PPE): $1.90 / 1K results. You are billed per profile-found actually returned — plus the tiny apify-actor-start fee Apify waives for short runs. No subscription, no API key, no proxy fee on top.

Our edge: Name OR username OR email OR phone → confirmed profiles · direct 200-probe + DuckDuckGo SERP fallback · match_confidence · no API key.

Pricing examples (pay only for what you get, minus Apify's 20%):

Volume	Cost
100 results	$0.19
1,000 results	$1.90
10,000 results	$19.00

How rivals price the same job (live Apify Store, checked 2026-06-09)

Actor	Their price	What they lack vs us
tri_angle/social-media-finder	$0.002 / result	strong incumbent (6.7K users, 4.79★) — by-name across 13 platforms
automation-lab/username-checker	$0.005 / username	username-only, 460+ platforms
onescales/social-media-profile-finder-pro	FREE	Sherlock-based, username-only

Prices above are competitors' live Store prices at the time of writing; ours is set to sit just below the strongest comparable while returning richer, quality-scored data.

🤖 Use with AI agents (MCP)

This actor is agent-ready (category MCP_SERVERS). Point any MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, n8n AI, LangGraph) at it:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=bovi/social-links-search",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" }
    }
  }
}

More scrapers from our toolkit

Building a data pipeline? These actors pair well with this one — each runs on your own Apify account with the same pay-per-result pricing, no subscription:

• Telegram Channel Scraper
• Truth Social Scraper
• Twitch Scraper
• Douyin Scraper
• Maigret Username Osint
• Patreon Scraper

Chain any of them together from the Integrations tab (the Run succeeded trigger) to build a multi-step workflow — one actor's output feeds the next.

Usage statistics

This Actor creates a small, content-free summary at the end of each run. It is used only to monitor reliability and improve this Actor. A copy is saved as USAGE_STATS in your own Apify key-value store, so you can see the exact record created for your run.

Set disableUsageStats to true in the input to opt out. Nothing is sent then; your USAGE_STATS record only says that statistics were disabled.

Only these fields are recorded:

• schema version, Actor name and build number;
• UTC start and finish hour (not a precise timestamp);
• run duration, number of results and time to the first result, each as a coarse range;
• whether the result was empty, the end status, and an error type from a fixed list;
• memory setting and counts of charged events;
• names of the input fields you set, never their values;
• the selected option for input fields that offer a fixed list of choices (for example a sort order).

We do not collect input text, search terms, URLs, domains, usernames, email addresses, names, proxy credentials, tokens, scraped records, output items, raw error messages, stack traces, or hashes of any of those values. Records are kept for no longer than 13 months, used only as aggregated operational statistics, and never sold or shared.

Additional fields (Phase 2)

This Actor also records your Apify user ID, whether Apify marks the account as paying, the size range of list inputs, the selected country when the input offers a fixed list of countries, and one category from a fixed Actor taxonomy. We use these fields only for aggregate reliability, repeat-use and cross-Actor analysis; reports suppress any cell with fewer than five distinct users.

The same disableUsageStats: true input flag turns these fields off too. The user ID is removed after 13 months; we do not export, sell, share, or attempt to re-identify this data.

Run-outcome signals (v2)

To learn whether a run did what it was asked to do, the record also holds a few more coarse ranges and yes/no flags. None of them contains content:

• the result limit you asked for (a range, when the input has one) and what share of it was delivered;
• results delivered per input item you listed (a range);
• output quality as ranges: how fully the result fields were filled, the share of rows that look like errors, the share of duplicate rows, and how many different fields appeared. These are counted in memory while results are saved; no result content is kept;
• how the run was started (console, API, schedule, webhook, another Actor);
• how it ended: stopped by you, timed out, reached the requested limit, stopped by the charge limit, and how many times the platform moved the run;
• if this Actor reports it: how many items to process worked or failed (ranges) and one failure reason from a fixed list;
• a short code made from the names of the input fields you set, never their values.

Repeat-run fingerprint (v2)

When your Apify user ID is recorded (see above), the record also holds an 8-character one-way code made from your input (proxy settings left out) and this Actor's name. It only lets us see that the same account ran the same input again soon after an unsatisfying run; we never see the input itself. It is stored only in the database, never published, and reports use it in aggregate with the same five-user minimum. It is the one exception to the statement above that no hashes are collected, and disableUsageStats: true turns it off.