While there are a plethora of ways to locate a person’s social media accounts when their name is common, an often-overlooked method is to first start by locating their email addresses and then pivoting from there.
Utilizing your data aggregators and various open-source tools, conduct a search of the person and note all of their associated email addresses. Now take the entire portion of the email address left of the @ symbol, commonly referred to as a username, and start searching for social media accounts with those usernames.
Example: If your target had the associated email address PhoenixPISteve@example.com, then you would search for social media accounts with the username PhoenixPISteve.
Real World Example: I needed to locate the private social media accounts for a government worker with a common name. After some difficulty searching by their name and for known family members, I pivoted and searched using the usernames from their various associated email addresses that I had gathered from the data aggregators. Within minutes, I uncovered all of their accounts on multiple social platforms. Their true name wasn’t associated with the accounts, but the accounts shared the same usernames as their associated email addresses, and a further review of the accounts confirmed ownership.