Social Media Scraping: What is it and Why you should do it in 2024

Let me share my thoughts about social media scraping and why I think it can help you to get the right data you need.

Social media scraping is an effective way to leverage data and level up your campaign strategies on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and more. From assessing audience engagement, and analyzing market trends, to learning about your competitors, data extraction from social media is very beneficial for your online business.

Are you struggling with generating leads or increasing sales of your business?

Here is the kicker: scrape data from social media.

Having a handful of useful data will help you carry out effective, well-informed marketing campaigns

Throughout your social media business accounts.

Imagine you are running a campaign but can’t target a specific group or audience,

And you carelessly create a campaign that you’re not sure can attract people or not.

This is where data becomes important.

With the information, you will know what kind of trends people are tuning to, which you can use to create campaigns for your business.

You can also target relevant audiences that have a higher possibility to engage with your campaign.

“But, is scraping data legal? It will affect my business tho…”

No worries, here is a guide to understanding what is social media scraping thoroughly,

From the meaning, benefits, and legality, to the best & safe tool for scraping social media data.

Let’s dive in.

What is Social Media Scraping?

Social media scraping is the process of extracting & gathering data automatically from social media such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Web scraping or screen scraping is an automated process from a bot or a tool.

So, when you run the software, it will automatically gather data from the app or website based on the information you want to collect.

The bot will then collect every single word, analyze the context of them, and present it in an easy-to-read format.

“Is having easy-to-read data the only benefit of using a scraper tool for social media?”

Nope. There is actually a lot that you can gain from scraping social media.

Let’s find out.

The 3 Main Benefits of Scraping Social Media

There is more than having neat data collection when you scrape social media.

Here are the benefits of social media scraping for businesses.

1. Social media scraping can help generate more leads & assess audience quality

There is an advanced way to leverage your interactions with your audience

Rather than just pushing your engagement rate.

It’s to generate more leads & asses the audience quality.

Imagine your customers are discussing what they like & dislike in your post’s comment section,

Highlighting preferences, or basically engaging with your content,

And you do nothing about it. Such a huge mistake, isn’t it?

Start scraping every single data from your audience to know their preferences,

What they like & dislike about your content, and use them to optimize your content strategy.

2. Extracting social media data can help analyze market sentiment

There is a smart way to turn everything that people say about your brand:

Extract them into meaningful insight data.

Ask the tool to analyze every mention of your brand on social media, collect the data, and draw a sentiment.

Then, turn them into real data sets that help you reach your marketing goals.

This way, it will be clear whether your brand has a negative or positive sentiment in the market.

If your brand turns out to be perceived as a negative, you can run a campaign to recover & reenact a good brand image, and vice versa.

By having this information, you will know what to do with your strategy.

Imagine you don’t have any data about it. All your campaigns will be a waste of time & money without actually solving the problem.

3. Scraping can help improve your business strategy on social media

The ultimate goal of scraping social media & extracting public data is:

To strengthen and develop your marketing strategies on social media.

As I mentioned above, you can’t just run a campaign recklessly without leveraging the trends,

And also the specific target audience.

The happening trends can be analyzed and used in your campaign, making it noticeable, and hopefully successful in reaching your target audience.

All the data you get from social media, leads, relevant audience, market trends, & brand sentiment

Will be a powerful fuel to run a successful marketing campaign that brings real results.

Is social media scraping legal? What type of data can we scrape from social media?

Yes, scraping public data on social media is completely legal, in some notes, you don’t use it to harm the users.

You must also be aware of the public data allowed by each social media to avoid getting blocked from the app.

Here are some data allowed by social media to be collected.

Types of data allowed by Facebook for scraping

Scraping data from Facebook is allowed by Meta according to the new legal proceedings,

Except for extracting private content without permission

And selling it to a third party for profit without the user’s consent.

Users can also now manage their data sharing sent from other sites.

Here are the types of public information you can gather on Facebook:

• Username, profile URL, profile photo URL, following and followers information, likes and interest themes, and so on are all included in profiles.
• Posts include information such as the date, location, number of likes, views, and comments, as well as text and media URLs.

Types of Instagram Data that are legal to extract

Instagram is the most popular social media platform for businesses.

Scraping data from the visual app will also help you run a campaign that brings back real results.

Same as Facebook (as it’s also under Meta), Instagram allows users to control their data authorization.

We have also tested & reviewed scraping tools for Instagram if you need them for your business.

Here is the data you can extract from Instagram:

• Profiles such as posts, followers & following, and external URLs.
• Comments from post date, post URL, comments, and likes.
• Hashtags, from post URL, media URL, and post author ID.

Type of allowed data to scrape on Twitter

The best thing about Twitter: it’s the only app that allows social media scraping openly

By giving free access to Twitter data on the API.

To use the Twitter API, you must first register.

This is very beneficial as companies are not afraid of getting blocked as long as they obey Twitter’s API regulations. 

However, free features will always be limited. The Twitter API limits the user to only scrape 18,000 tweets per 15-minute window.

The data that can be collected from Twitter include:

• Keywords – hashtags, from brand hashtags, and location-specific hashtags, to audience-specific hashtags.
• Tweets from specific profiles
• Profile information from a public account such as their bio, number of followers, & following.

Using APIs is the best way to scrape social media automatically

Exactly.

If you want to use web scraping a lot easier: use a web scraping API.

API, short for Application Programming Interface, is a set of protocols that helps two software systems communicate with each other.

Using an API in your scraping data process can help you completely automate your social media scraping process.

Yes, you can do other important business stuff while the bot is extracting data.

The automated process will also bring the data to the analytics software without being asked.

Second thing, you can collect data from social media in real-time.

Trending topics are changing every minute, even seconds, so extracting the most details moment will be possible with web scraping API.

Basically, a web scraping API allows you to set up several scraping requests automatically & regularly,

Even when you are not available.

What Is the Best Social Media Scraping Tool?

I have tested & reviewed several scraping tools,

And Inflact tops our ranking.

Inflact offers 3 kinds of data collection APIs to extract data from websites, including Instagram.

This scraper is also one of the best proxy providers & VPNs that offer any kind of forward servers.

Each one of the options allows targeting any location and even targeting local SEO, for SERP Scraper API.

The best thing about Inflact: it provides insurance for its product usage.

No limits on any concurrent sessions which end in 30 minutes, you will then get your data in CSV.

All of this is only $50/month for the pay-as-you-go plan.

There is also a Free Trial if you want to check the software first.

Can I Scrape social media with Python on Github

Of course, you can start scraping by using your own program.

As long as you understand Python, then you’re free to go.

But if you have no idea about what Python is, and you want to use the cheapest way ever to scrape data,

It’s better to use the already-made tool to avoid the worst risks.

Also, for efficiency and security.

If you need an affordable tool, just pick from our recommendations,

But if you are confident in using the pre-programmed tool, it’s your call.

My Final Take: Scrape Social Media Data to Level Up your Marketing Strategy in 2024

There is no way you are not using data to create business & marketing strategies on social media.

Data nowadays is a very important subject if you want to run effective social media marketing campaigns.

From generating leads, assessing audience quality, and analyzing market sentiment, to collecting industry trends,

Scraping social media is a must-do to improve your business strategy on social media.

And the best way to run comprehensive & accurate data collection is through the help of social media scrapers.

Remember, there are a lot of scrapers out there, it’s important to check each feature before using it.

Scams & unsafe tools won’t compensate for your loss, so it’s crucial to be careful.

My best choice lands on Inflact , it’s the most secure scraping tool for social media.

You can also subscribe to it at a very affordable price, starting at only $50/month for the pay-as-you-go plan.

You can enjoy unlimited sessions & city-level targeting.

You can also use the FREE trial if you still doubt the features.

Start using the best scraping tool for social media and level up your marketing game in 2024.

Do you understand now about social media scraping? Do you have a helpful tool for scraping too?

Share it with us in the comments section below 😉

Note: Contact us here & contribute your thoughts if you think we miss something to talk about.

Your Questions about Social Media Scraping