Social Media Scraping and Its Benefits

There are 7.9 billion people in the world, out of which 50% are online. That is roughly 3.8 billion people. Online marketing is a huge sector, bringing in around $537 billion, which is a 3.9% rise from 2020. Particularly, social media websites are the most visited websites online, so companies have started to promote their

There are 7.9 billion people in the world, out of which 50% are online. That is roughly 3.8 billion people. Online marketing is a huge sector, bringing in around $537 billion, which is a 3.9% rise from 2020. Particularly, social media websites are the most visited websites online, so companies have started to promote their products on social media through sponsors or social media influencers. Social media becomes a part of our life both professionally and privately.

From chatting, sharing our day-to-day life, and messaging in the forms of vlogs, to professional tutoring, online courses, and marketing, people spend a lot of time online. Large chunks of marketing strategies from an organization now involve social media marketing. As mentioned, social media websites are the most visited websites online, which means a huge amount of data is being processed every second. This can be a huge advantage to companies. With this data, they can devise an iron-clad plan for improving their product. But how?

The amount of data is huge in terms of size. It is not possible to manually retrieve all data. This is where web scraping comes into the spotlight. In this article, we will look into how social media scraping benefits companies.

What Is Social Media Web Scraping?

Social media scraping, or social media automation, is the process of extracting a large amount of raw social media data from a website and organizing them to perform the required analysis. This process is automated with the help of scrapers/bots. These bots crawl through social media websites, gather the necessary information, and compile them in the form of a database for sentiment/competitive analysis purposes. It should be noted that implementing web scraping must properly follow all the necessary guidelines and it should not affect the original owner of the data in any shape or form.

API in Social Media Scraping:

It is possible to scrape the social media data with a few lines of python code by using a python library called “BeautifulSoup.” This library helps to request and collect the required data from the targeted websites. The collected data can then be transformed into structured data (dataframe) using another python library called “Pandas” and then saved to documents with preferred formats like CSV.

This is a good start, but to automate the whole process, it is recommended to use an API. An API (Application Programming Interface) helps to request and receive the data from the targeted website without any human intervention. Involving an API also helps to extract data in real-time since social media changes by the second with new and updated information. The last thing is that it is possible to directly feed the scraped data into your database without any human intervention.

With API scraping, you can scrap the data at a regular interval of time automatically, so the load on the target website will get reduced.

Now you have a basic idea of what social media scraping is and how API benefits the scraping of the data in the social media platform. Let us see the benefits of social media scraping itself.

Benefits of Social Media Scraping:

Social media scraping is mainly used for business strategy and operations. Big companies keenly started to use social media as an important platform to get to know how people feel about their products and the organization’s motives. But how to do that? This is possible by scraping the data and performing sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis is the process of mining text data and extracting subjective information to understand the social sentiment of a company’s product and services. Take Instagram as an example, the traffic for Instagram on a single day is around 500 million according to backlink. Your audience is online constantly discussing their thoughts, views, and opinions while highlighting your achievements.

Building a Relationship with Consumers:

There is also a possibility to have a direct conversation with them. All this data can be scraped to perform a sentiment analysis with social media scraping. With the help of API, you can also automate the whole process by directly feeding the scraped data into the database tool. From there, you can perform sentiment analysis. This is a good way to understand the consumer’s actual thoughts on your products and services instead of bombarding them with spam emails.

With sentiment analysis, you can improve your relationship with the consumer by understanding their expectations and trying to achieve them in a friendly manner. Today, public relations is a difficulty faced by many companies.

For Business Strategies:

For example, the Amazon customer service department gets around 1500 customer inquiries a day and must create solutions for the problems that customers face with their products. With this, Amazon did a small study on social media platforms. They extracted data from their customer service, fed them into their database, and performed extensive sentiment analysis. Based on the results, they restructure their refund process. This helped a lot of people to get their deserved refunds for the products and helped to detect refund frauds.

From the case study, it can be seen that Amazon not only solved problems for several hundreds of its customers, but it also reconstructed its whole business strategy framework. If people are saying certain things about your organization, you can collect the data and perform analyses. Most of the time, social media applications influence people to buy products. With social media scraping, you can stay updated with the latest market trends.

For Business Promotion:

Social media scraping is also a great tool for promoting your business. By scraping social media accounts, you can have a better understanding of the consumer thought process as it pertains to your business. Based on the result, you can find the right strategy for promoting your business.

Is There a Social Media Scraping Tool?

Yes, there are many social media scraping tools available. Some of them are integrated with API for automation. But it is better to perform the automation on your own. In this way, you can customize the requirement and the interval of time for scraping data. A few lines of python using “BeautifulSoup” python library and selenium will do the trick. For automating the process, you can use a free proxy with API. ProxyScrape does offer an API proxy for scraping web pages. You can get the API proxy here

1. Is it legal to scrape social media sites?
   Scraping public data is legal unless it is copyrighted and needs permission.
2. Can you scrap Instagram?
   Yes, you can scrap Instagram for posts, hashtags, and profiles including the number of likes, comments, followers, and verified status.
3. What programming language is best for scraping data from social media?
   Python is the best language to perform both social media scraping and sentiment analysis.

Closing Thoughts

Social media is rapidly changing every day. It is challenging for businesses to meet the requirements. Performing social media data analysis is a good step toward knowing customers’ requirements. The important thing to remember while scraping is anonymity. It is always better to take some precautions if you are handling sensitive information. ProxyScrape can help you achieve that anonymity without compromising the effectiveness of scraping.