Due to the wide proliferation of internet-enabled devices, social media platforms are now more popular than ever. According to Statista’s 2024 survey, there are 5.04 billion social media users out of 5.44 billion internet users. With billions of users worldwide, social media platforms act as one of the largest sources of data, with the only problem being the effective extraction of useful insights from each source. However, because the data from these platforms is easily accessible, they are widely sought after by many companies.
If you want to grow your company quickly, you need to be able to effectively utilize the large volumes of data you'll find online. Social media scraping ensures that the data generated on these platforms can be analyzed and extracted without difficulty. By leveraging social media scraping tools and web scraping APIs, you can extract large volumes of data from multiple platforms at once.
What is Social Media Scraping?
Social media scraping is a simple process that involves analyzing different platforms using several advanced techniques. Yes, your company can gain information by searching for a word or product on a search engine, but it's bound to take plenty of time and money. When done correctly, this process can save organizations crucial resources while providing them with the information they need.
Can you imagine the hassle of manually scrolling through a web page because you're looking for a word before going ahead to analyze your search results and extract useful information from them? If you use a social media scraping tool, it will ensure that all the information you need is at your fingertips. All you have to do is tell the application what you want it to do. Social media scrapers are effective tools that can gather different types of information including usernames, follower details, online comments, etc. You may then use this information for informed top-level decision-making or to update your sales strategy.
While there's an increased risk of the extracted data falling into the wrong hands, your goal should be to use this insight to make informed decisions like creating marketing campaigns, designing end-user products, etc.
The Best Social Media Scrapers of 2024
Are you looking for the best tools to help you with social media scraping? We've compiled a list of the best alternatives. They include:
| Web Scraping Tool | Features |
|---|---|
| Octoparse | Automatic IP rotation, Automated extraction, Data exporting, Cloud extraction, Anti-blocking technology, AI powered |
| PhantomBuster | Auto lead extraction, Email, phone number, image, IP, and email address extraction, Tailored marketing campaigns, IP Address Extraction |
| Scraping Robot | JavaScript rendering, Parsed metadata, Management of proxies to retrieve HTML content, User-friendly and cloud-based infrastructure |
Octoparse
Octoparse is easily one of the best web social media scraping tools because it allows users to access useful insights without any coding knowledge. This application boasts a simple user interface that supports text-based searches, infinite scrolling, and several drop-down menus. Additionally, the current version of the app has a feature that allows it to automatically detect useful data from a website. Furthermore, the extracted insight on this platform can be exported in different formats including databases, JSON, HTML, and Excel.
PhantomBuster
As one of the most effective social media scraping tools, PhantomBuster allows users to extract data with little or no hassle. This application also contains pre-made automation recipes for different social media platforms including TikTok, LinkedIn, and Google Maps. However, it's crucial to note that the developers of this application only rely on public data scraping principles to avoid falling on the wrong side of the law. This application also extracts results in JSON and CSV formats.
Scraping Robot
While this scraping tool was designed for developers, it allows you to extract data from different platforms without worrying about issues like browser scalability, proxy management and rotation, CAPTCHA solving, or server management. This tool will also check for anti-scraping updates on different target websites.
Features to Look for in Scraping Tools
Without a doubt, there are several social media scraping tools, and it can be overwhelming to choose an alternative. Here's a list of features to look out for:
- Customization: It makes sense to choose a social media scraping tool that goes through target websites just like a human would. The scraper should work carefully to scan the website without getting cut off. The best types of scrapers often allow you the freedom to choose which data you wish to extract from a target website. It should be able to adjust which account username or mention you wish to track while creating different metric categories such as the number of likes, views, comments, retweets, post saves, etc.
- Programming Language: Your preferred ideal social media scraping tool should be designed in a familiar programming language. While there are different programming languages used to design scrapers, Python has proven to be a popular choice because of its ease of use and easy access to community support for customization. However, if you lack prior programming experience, you can also opt for no-code scrapers.
- Scalability: Your preferred social media scraping tool should allow you to adjust the large volume of data you wish to extract from your target website. For instance, you should be able to find out the number of likes on a post while leaving out the total number of comments. It should also allow you to target more than one website at once.
- Ease of Use: It's also a good idea for your preferred scraper tool to have a user-friendly interface that's suitable for beginners and seasoned users.
Why Use Proxies for Social Media Scraping
Let's say you wish to scrape a social media platform. It's crucial to note that it'll be quite challenging. Many platforms do not want to be scraped for data and have put measures in place to prevent such type of activity. So there's a huge risk that your actions will be flagged, resulting in a ban or IP blocking. That's why you need to use your social media scraper along with proxies to make your work easier.
Proxies minimize the risk of detection and getting blocked during social media scraping. They also allow you to scrape the data from a particular geographic location that's restricted on your target platform. Live Proxies is a top-rated premium proxy service that's compatible with several use cases. It offers you access to rotating residential, static residential, and rotating mobile IPs. All of its features can be applied for businesses and individuals.
How to Scrape Different Social Media Platforms?
While there are different types of social media platforms with tons of useful information on them, you can scrape data from all of them using similar techniques. The simplest way to do this would be by using a tool that allows you to extract from each of these platforms and present data in different formats. It's a good idea to use a proxy alongside social media scrapers to avoid getting detected and blocked. Afterward, decide the type of insight you wish to gain from each platform. The following is a list of data you should look to gain from each platform:
- Facebook: Scrapers will scan through the profiles, pages, and groups of Facebook accounts to help you determine their engagement, impression, organic likes, and post reach. They'll display the number of likes, comments, shares, clicks, and reactions of accounts.
- Instagram: Scrapers can help you gather the number of new followers on an account, the number of posts linked to a hashtag, the number of unique accounts that viewed a post or story, the number of clicks of bio link, the number of people that visit a profile, the number of likes and comments per post, and the number of times users have saved a post.
- Twitter: Scrapers can determine the number of retweets on a post, the total number of followers on an account, the total number of profile visits, the total number of link clicks, the total number of times a username was mentioned by others, and how many people have replied to your tweet.
What Are the Benefits of Scraping Social Media?
So why should you even attempt web scraping social media? Take a look at the following reasons:
Handle Sentiment Analysis for your Marketing Research
If you want to perform a sentiment analysis for an upcoming market campaign, social media scraping is one of the best alternatives. Many of your customers are constantly talking about their interests, likes, and dislikes on social media platforms. You can gather all of this data at once, and it'll act like a survey to determine if online users are interested in your products or not.
Connects You With Customers
As an online business owner, it's crucial that you try your best to connect with customers. You need to understand that you won't sell to everyone that visits your profile. So tracking who’s interested in what you offer is a great way to learn what you're doing right and what you're not. By scraping social media, you'll find out all those who have visited your page or mentioned your product. These scrapers also ensure you can track what's going on in several platforms at once.
Creates Fact-Based Business Strategy
If you've recently been struggling to reach your sales target or haven't sent out any others in a while, the best thing to do is find out what's wrong. An easy way to do this is by digging deep to learn what customers are saying. Scrape social media to learn the current market sentiment towards your product and any recurrent challenges faced by customers and use this information to tackle the problem. By scraping several platforms at once, you’ll gain enough information to create a customer-oriented strategy.
The Ethics and Legalities of Social Media Scraping
If it's your first time attempting social media scraping, you may wonder whether or not your activities are legal because of the extensive access to user information. Upon close observation, it's safe to say that most social media scraping tools only read and extrapolate the public information of social media users such as the number of people that viewed a post, the number of likes, comments, and retweets on a post, the number or profile visit, and the number of people that clicked your bio link. This type of activity is considered legal. On the other hand, any social media scraping methods targeted at stealing the private information of online users such as their login credentials and billing information is considered illegal.
Aside from the type of information gotten from these platforms, another thing that determines the legality of these data scraping activities is what this information will be used for. It's legal to use data scraping information for market research, strategy development, marketing campaign creation, and sentiment analysis. For instance, Spotify has created a Twitter account to track brand-related tweets and handle them appropriately. However, if the extracted information is used for spamming or scamming online users, it's considered illegal.
Is it Legal to Scrape Social Media?
Next, let's consider the legalities behind the social media data scraping of different platforms.
It's legal to scrape data from Facebook as long as it's not copyrighted. While Meta has introduced several measures and updated its terms of use to reduce scraping, you can do it as long as you avoid collecting private information such as user addresses and contact information. Instead, you should focus on details like the number of followers on a page or the likes and comments on a particular post. There was a recent court case where Meta tried to sue Bright Data for data scraping. However, the social media giant failed because it had no laws preventing scraping companies from accessing public data.
Like Facebook, Instagram allows you to scrape social media data as long as you don't touch anything that's copyrighted to the platform. As a product of Meta, it also has similar rules and measures against illegal scraping activities.
It's also legal to scrape data from Twitter as long as you stick to what can be accessed without logging in. You may even gain information using Twitter APIs. However, scraping data from Twitter is quite challenging because the platform has recently updated its system to limit what non-logged-in users can access.
LinkedIn also allows social media data scraping even though it has taken several measures to prevent it. LinkedIn was also engaged in a 5-year court case with hiQ labs to halt their data scraping. Despite winning this case, it was clear that this platform needed to review its laws to cover the specific use of misuse of data. To extract data legally from LinkedIn, you'll also need to stick to publicly accessible information such as the number of followers on an account, the number of views on a post, the number of people who liked a post, etc.
How does social media scraping work?
Social media scraping involves using automated tools or bots to collect and extract data from social media platforms. This can include publicly available information such as posts, comments, likes, and user profiles. The data is then processed and analyzed for various purposes such as market research or sentiment analysis.
What are the risks of data scraping?
Data scraping may result in violating the terms of service or data privacy laws of your target platform. It can also lead to IP blocking, bans, and damage to a company’s reputation. Additionally, scraped data may be incomplete or inaccurate, affecting the quality of the analysis.
What's the major issue about analyzing information that is scraped from social media platforms?
The major issue is data accuracy and reliability. Scraped data can be outdated, incomplete, or taken out of context, leading to skewed analysis. Additionally, ethical concerns about privacy and consent arise when analyzing data obtained without users' explicit permission.
