Social media scraper is a tool businesses use to extract data publicly available on social media platforms to know more about their customers. A social media scraper extracts content from social media platforms that businesses use for market research, understanding customers, performing sentiment analysis, and more.
Social media scrapers have 4 key benefits as are listed below:
- Improves business strategy as when you have access to relevant, accurate user data through social media scraping, you can use it to understand your business, customers, and competitors.
- Enhances audience engagement so that businesses stay updated with the habits and practices of social media users who are their targeted audience and offer products, services, and updates they would like
- Mitigates public relations challenges by keeping an eye on business relationships with their customers to find out points to improve upon the business’ online presence.
- Stay updated with the latest trends as they change frequently. With the help of scraped data, you can understand the latest trends and shape your offerings to get an edge over your competitors.
Geekflare team has put together the list of the best social media scrapers based on features like unlimited requests, scaling capability, and retrieval of data regardless of the geolocation.
Disclaimer: obey the terms of service of social media platforms and prioritize user privacy when using scraping tools. Scraping may be prohibited in some jurisdictions.
Bright Data
Bright Data is a social media scraper that collects publicly available data. It retrieves profiles, jobs, URLs, and images to timestamps, comments, and marketplace posting from all social media platforms.
By utilizing proprietary site unlocking technology, Bright Data is able to easily access as much data as is required for research and analysis purposes. It is a feature-rich tool that offers three options:
- The web unlocker API plays an important role in data scraping because it works as a proxy server and helps you scrape data in real-time.
- The web scraping IDE is a cloud-based tool that gives you ready-made scraping codes and functions and allows you to get customized results.
- Working with dataset tools is extremely easy because all the related information is pre-collected from popular social media platforms. However, you can also opt for new datasets based on your requirements.
Bright Data exports all collected data in Excel, JSON, or CSV. You won’t have to worry about legality as Bright Data complies with all data protection regulations like CCPA and GDPR.
Smartproxy
Smartproxy is an all-in-one social media scraper with unmatched scaling capability in gathering vast social media data without any limitation from proxies or blocks.
Smartproxy is designed to work with Instagram and TikTok and help you track engagement rates, discover new trends, and keep tabs on competitors’ growth. The scraper has been designed meticulously so it can integrate as an API or proxy server and help you retrieve all the required data.
The data points Smartproxy delivers are profiles, usernames, posts, hashtags, photos, videos, and many other essential data. This tool offers several parameters like language, category geolocation, and techniques to ensure you can get the accurate dataset you need.
While making requests for data extraction, Smartproxy allows users to opt for real-time or planned-out time updates; thus, you have complete control over how you get the data. Unlike other scraping tools, it has no limitation in placing request data.
IPRoyal
IPRoyal is a popular choice for scraping social media data. What makes this tool stand apart is its ability to send numerous requests to social media platforms with reliable proxies to fetch the data you need without security risks.
Moreover, IPRoyal doesn’t restrict based on geolocation and social media platforms. The API is able to gather your desired dataset from anywhere you want. Whether it is YouTube, Instagram, FaceBook, or TikTok, you won’t have any problem retrieving data points like names, comments, posts, images, etc.
IPRoyal is a highly efficient and accurate as it can easily retrieve unstructured data from various social media platforms and deliver them to you. While gathering a dataset, you will neither encounter reliability issues nor will you have problems with scalability as it collects a large amount of data without any compromise.
IPRoyal comes in five different plans, including residential and mobile. If you are looking to make unlimited requests and comprehensive geolocation coverage, then Static Residential, Datacenter, or Sneaker plans will be incredible for you.
Zyte
Zyte is a powerful social media scraper that is fast but also accurate and efficient for businesses’ retrieving social media data. It’s actually a general-purpose social media scraper that takes care of your needs without any compromise.
The Zyte API is a complete and meticulously programmed web scraper that can rotate IP and avoid extracting all the necessary data from the target social media platform. For large businesses, the scraper also provides TypeScript API, and it can be used for doing integral functionalities.
Zyte neither has limitations on the type of social media from which you want to scrape data nor is it restricted by geolocation. Once you choose the platform, it will automatically set the location and proxies based on your requirements so that it can extract the data accurately.
If you don’t want to spend time scraping data from different social media platforms, opt for Zyte Data, to find all the needed data. It scrapes all the necessary data from different social media platforms on a regular basis and makes sure all its users get their requirements fulfilled instantly.
Zyte is a highly cost-effective scraper, and the pricing varies depending on the features and scraping difficulty.
Social media scraping is used for 4 in cases:
- Market research: Market research serves as the primary source when it comes to getting information for your business. However, you can’t extract all the user data; you can only utilize username, profile URL, follower information, likes, interest, etc.
- Lead generation: You can use a social media scraper to gain useful user information and target customers. Many users target Twitter for lead generation because it has billions of users and allows the scraping of publicly accessible data. From profiles and tweets to keywords and hashtags, all such Twitter data can be highly useful for your business.
- Competitor analysis: Every business or organization faces competition in the market, so it becomes necessary for everyone to do competitor analysis. Instagram has allowed businesses to extract information about competitors through their profiles, their customers’ comments, posts, popularity, and other data.
- Sentiment analysis: As a business owner, you can scrape data from social media platforms like YouTube or Facebook to analyze the sentiment of customers on your product or service. Apart from personal information, YouTube legally allows users to scrape data like review videos, comments, and views to analyze customers’ sentiments.
Besides social media web scraper tools, businesses can stay up to date on market trends and industry coverage using news scraper tools and APIs.
Social media management tool and a social media scraper tool are both used for social media data handling, though the tasks and purposes they are used for are different.
Social media management tools create, schedule, and monitor content across social media platforms, while a social media scraper tool extracts and analyzes publicly available data from social media platforms.
Here is a quick summary of tools for both purposes, categorized by audience type.
| Functions | For beginners | For small to medium businesses | For advanced users |
|---|---|---|---|
| Social media management tools | Buffer, Later, Hootsuite | SocialPilot, Sprout Social, Agopurlse | Brandwatch, Sprinklr |
| Social media scraper tools | Octoparse, Parsehub, Smartproxy | Bright Data, IPRoyal, Oxylabs | Zyte, Apify |
Yes, a social media management tool could have a scraping feature as a functionality-enhancing add-on. However, since features and capabilities vary, the tool should be able to fit the user’s needs. Similarly, a social media scraper tools could be integrated with a tool used for social media management for a comprehensive take on the handling of social media data. A combined approach allows for the management of social media presences with the extraction of valuable data from their platforms.