In most cases, losing touch with a friend is easy to fix by just picking up your phone and sending them a message. The problem is if it’s been so long since you two last spoke that your old means of communication are just dead in the water. Perhaps you haven’t talked to them since high school, or maybe they changed their number since you last spoke.

There are so many reasons why you may be out of contact, but if you want to get back in touch and need ideas on how to find them online, you’ve come to the right place:

Reasons Why You May Not Be Able to Find Them Online Easily

There are so many reasons why you may struggle to find them again online or otherwise. For example:

• You were never mutuals on social media
• They changed their name
• You don’t know their full legal name
• They’ve deactivated or deleted the social accounts you used to follow each other on

Top Tips to Find an Old Friend Online

To help you find and reconnect with those old friends, use these top tips:

● If You Don’t Know Their Legal Name

If you don’t know your friend’s full legal name, that can put a huge spanner in the works. You may only remember their nickname or their first name, and that will make it difficult to find someone online. Today, most people use their real, legal names on social accounts, so if you just had that name in question, you could get the ball rolling.

So, where do you go to find their full name? You go on the internet, where you can find yearbook pictures online from across the country. Find your old yearbook, locate your old friend, and see their full name printed out plain as day. If you’re lucky, you’ll even be able to connect with them right then and there.

● If You Never Followed Each Other on Social Media

If you never followed each other on social media before, you can start by using their real name on the largest platforms of Facebook, Instagram, X, or BlueSky. Since you likely have at least a few mutuals, their account should appear when you enter their real name.

● If They Deactivated their Social Accounts

Things can get tricky if they’re one of the growing people who are increasingly removing Facebook and Instagram from their lives, then you may be out of luck when it comes to using social search. In that case, you’ll likely need to go down the professional route. Try on searches like LinkedIn, or use a face search engine to find their professional profile, and see about getting in touch that way.

● If They Changed Their Name

Another challenge is whether they changed their name. On social media, they may only have their username, which may or may not relate to their real name. Otherwise, they may have changed their name legally, for example, if they got married. In this case, you will want to look through mutual friends’ follower lists for their first name and see if you can spot them that way.