Are you trying to find someone on Facebook? Maybe you want to research someone from a dating app before meeting up in person, or maybe you’re trying to locate an old friend on this platform.

Fortunately, there are several ways to find someone on Facebook. This article explains how to search for someone’s phone number to add them as friend on Facebook.

1. Search on Facebook

If the person you’re looking for has a common name, it could be difficult to spot their profile among all other Facebook users through a general name search. In this case, using their phone number or email address to perform your search is a much more efficient way when they have the number/email associated with their account.

Here is how to search for a phone number on Facebook. Instructions apply to Facebook in a web browser and the Facebook app.

Step 1: Navigate to Facebook.com and sign into your account.

Step 2: Click the search bar, then type the phone number and press the Enter key.

Step 3: By default, this search delivers results about anything related to the phone number—including pages, places, groups, and more. To filter out everything except profiles, simply select the People tab.

If you see a matching profile, select the person’s name or profile photo to view their Facebook profile, or click the add friend button to send a friend request.

If you can’t spot the correct profile in your results, try filtering the results using other information about this person, such as city, education, work or mutual friends.

2. Intelius

The easiest way to find someone’s social media profile is using a people search tool like Intelius. The tool focuses exclusively on providing people-related information, including names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, pictures, social media profiles, and more.

All you need to do is enter the person’s phone number into Intelius, and it will compile data related to the person from various sources, into one report.

3. Social Catfish

Another tool you might want to try is Social Catfish. Much like Intelius listed above, this site digs up a wealth of information on the person you’re trying to find, leveraging millions of data points and dozens of data sources.

What we like most about Social Catfish is that it offers more search options than most people search tools – you can search for people by name, phone number, email, address, username, and even photos. And its reports are always impressive, which may include information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, social media profiles, photos, associates, and more when available.

4. PeopleFinders

PeopleFinders is a powerful online investigation service. With data collected from public forums, social media, county records, state records, and federal records, it’s an excellent tool for digging up information about people.

If you’ve ever placed personal information anywhere online, whether that be your email address, birth date, or location, PeopleFinders is likely to have it. You can run a free reverse phone lookup with this tool but it doesn’t provide as much detail as you get with a membership.

5. Google Search

A simple search with a generalized search engine, such as Google, Bing, or Duckduckgo is also a useful way to track down someone online.

Just plug everything you know about this person into Google, their name, approximate location, etc, along with their phone number. When you’re doing this, make sure you put the number in quotes to make Google bring up only results that contain the exact number of your query.

For example, you can type:

"0123456789" LA John Doe 

Or if you are connected with this person on any social media, try running a reverse image lookup with their profile picture to see if Google can spit back all other instances of that image that it finds on the web. Since people are not very creative when it comes to mixing social media usernames, profiles, and passwords, you have a high chance of finding their other social media accounts this way.

Just go to Google Images, click the camera icon, and upload the image you want to search.

If all your searches fail, try to hunt down your subject’s friends and family members on social media instead; it’s possible that the person you’re trying to find is hiding their account behind an unrecognizable username.