Top 10 Social Media Scraping Tools for Data Extraction

Are you looking forward to scraping data from social media platforms for your research and marketing campaigns? Then come in now and discover the best social media scraping tool in the market that you can use.

Top Social Media Scraping Tools

In the past, the availability of data is one of the major issues in research, and in many cases, you will have to spend a huge sum of money to gain access to data from your business and research work.

This is no longer the case, as the advent of the Internet has made data so available that knowing what to do with data is now the issue for most people. Social media sites are some of the websites on the Internet that offer you big data of human-generated content, which is not only relevant to social studies and research but also marketing researches.

While it has been established that social media platforms are some of the largest sources of data, especially when human-generated content is being considered, being able to extract data from social media platforms is not easy, especially if you want to scrape a large chunk of data that manual data extraction methods would not work.

You will need to make use of web scrapers that have support for social media platforms. In this article, we would be recommending to you some of the best social media scraping tools you can use for scraping social media websites.


What is Social Media Scraping Tools?

Social Media Scraping Tools

Social media scraping tools are nothing more than web scrapers that you can use to extract data from social media web pages. For those that are new to the world of web scrapers and web scraping, web scrapers are automation tools in the form of computer bots that have been designed to extract data from web pages in an automated manner.

These bots send web requests for web pages, and if the pages are returned, they comb through them in other to parse and extract data of interest. They do this in an automated manner, sending too many requests within a short period of time, making it possible to scrape your data of interest within a short period of time.

However, while this might be beneficial to you, if you send too many requests, you can be hurting the web servers. Aside from hurting web servers, websites and social media platforms do not like the idea of scraping content from their platform and, as such, would block you if you are caught doing so. For your bot to be successful, it needs to bypass the anti-bot systems of its target websites.


Why Scrape Social Media Platforms?

Are you wondering why someone would be interested in scraping social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and even TikTok? Well, each web scraper would have his own reason, but below are the major reasons why you will want to scrape social media web pages.

  • Lead Generation

social media lead generation

Social media platforms have the contact details of users publicly displayed that you can scrape and use as a lead for your business.

For lead generation and finding business prospects, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are some of the major targets. Many users on LinkedIn and Facebook have their contact, and professional details publicly displayed that you can extract and use for creating leads.

  • Sentimental Analysis

Sentimental Analysis How does a group of people feel about certain topics and ideas? If you want to find out, then all you need to do is scrape discussion threads and hashtags about the topic and use it to run sentimental analysis.

If you are a politician, you can benefit from scraping tweets on Twitter about you and run sentimental analyses to see whether you will be voted or not.

  • Marketing and Social Research

Marketing and Social Research

Sentimental analysis is just one aspect of social studies and research. Data is incredibly important not only to social researchers but also to marketers as they need to know what their customers want from them and how they feel about their business and competitors.

A good number of buyers would vent their frustrations or praise a product using social media. People with a terrorist mindset and other criminals can be fished out using social media scraping. Data from social media scraping is also useful in training Artificial Intelligence systems too.


Top 10 Social Media Scraping Tools

There are a good number of scraping tools in the market that you can use for scraping social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. We would be discussing the top 10 so that you can have a list of only the best to choose from.


smartproxy scraping api

Smartproxy has proven to be one of the best proxy services in the market. Aside from its proxy service, it also offers a web scraping API for scraping data from websites. As a coder, you can make use of their Web Scraping API to scrape social media platforms. It can be likened to Proxycrawl, ScraperAPI, and ScrapingBee. However, unlike these 3, it is quite cheap.

You can use it to scrape Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and any social media platform you can think of. What you get is the raw HTML of the page – parsing is left to you. Over 195 countries are supported, making it the best in terms of scraping geo-targeted content. It has got over 40 million IPs and hundred of thousand of datacenter IPs. blocks are at a minimum and there is developer documentation available.


Jarvee

Jarvee Overview

Jarvee is one of the top social media automation tools in the market, with support for most of the popular social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. While many people are aware of Jarvee’s effectiveness in automating their actions to improve reach and rapid growth, not many people know that you can use it to scrape social media data such as posts, comments, and follower lists, among others.

This tool is quite effective as a scraping tool, and you can use it to scrape Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. Jarvee is a Windows-based tool, and as such, if you are using any other Operating System (OS), you will need to run it on a Windows VPS or VM machine.


Parsehub

ParseHub Best Scrapers

Parsehub is the tool for scraping any website of your choice without writing even a line of code – all you need to use is the point and click interface. One thing you will come to like about this tool is that it has been designed for the modern web, which makes it perfect for scraping social media pages that depend on JavaScript actions to render content.

The Parsehub tool is available as a cloud-based solution, but if you are on a low budget, you can use the free version, which is downloadable and installable. The tool comes with some advanced features, including support for proxies and IP rotation, scheduled collection of data, regular expression-based parsing, and API and web-hooks.


Proxycrawl Scraper API

Proxycrawl Scraper API Overview

The Proxycrawl scraper API has been designed to collect structured data from specific websites on the Internet. Using this tool will make scraping easy for you as all you have to do to collect data is to use their scraper APIs. They have got a good number of scrapers, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and many more.

Proxycrawl does not just offer a scraper API; it also has a proxy API which you can use together with their extraction API to collect structured data from social media sites not included in their scraper API. This tool also has a proxy service meant for companies to use as the proxy service is not available for individual usage.


Apify

Apify Proxy Review

The Apify platform is an online service that has been designed to help you automates all of the actions that you do in a web browser. Even though the terms “all of your actions” can be seen as an exaggeration, there is no doubt that social media automation is one of the areas it covers generously.

They have got a good number of automation tools known as actors that aids in the scraping of social media platforms. Some of these include Facebook Page scraper, Instagram scraper, YouTube scraper, Twitter scraper, contact detail scraper, Reddit scraper, among others.

The Apify actors are made by developers and for developers. It supports the NodeJS platform and requires you to have the Apify client module/library n other to make use of it. It is a paid tool and provides you with shared proxies, or you can add your own high-quality proxies to prevent blocks.


ScraperAPI

Scraperapi Homepage Overview

The ScraperAPIis a proxy API for web scraping and one of the best for providing you proxies, handling headless browser, and bypassing Captchas so that accessing data from difficult to scrap social media sites is no longer a problem – all you have to think about is parsing and processing data.

It is not an automation tool but takes care of an integral part of scraping. The ScraperAPI has been designed to take care of anti-scraping and anti-bot systems so that you can have unrestricted access to data of interest. It has over 40 million IP addresses sourced from over 50 countries across the world.It is quite affordable, and you only get to pay for successful requests.


ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee overview

ScrapingBee is also one of the top social media scraping tools in the market. The ScrapingBee service can be said to be a competitor to ScraperAPI as it also offers proxy APIs for web scraping. However, aside from offering a proxy API, this service also offers an extraction tool that you can use CSS selectors toselect specific data points on any social media web page.

The service also charges based on successful requests but can be said to be an expensive alternative to ScraperAPI. With this tool, you will not experience blocks while trying to scrape data from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or any other social media platform.


Octoparse

Octoparse youtube scraper

The Octoparse tool has been developed mostly for non-programmers. If you do not have a coding skill and you want to scrape data from social media pages, then you can do that using Octoparse, a visual scraping tool designed for scraping. With this tool, all you need to do is use their initiative point and click interface to train the tool on the data you need to scrape.

One thing you will come to like about this tool is that you can use it for free for 2 weeks. This tool is available as a cloud-based tool, and you can also use it as a desktop application. It has templates for scraping social media platforms, and you can use it for most popular social media platforms.


Zyte

Zyte Overview

Formerly known as Scrapinghub, this company has made a name for itself and has been able to revolutionize the web scraping industry. It provides a complete suite of tools for web scraping.

With the right guidance and implementation of what is contained in their documentation page, you can develop social media scrapers for your target social media platform. The service is a combination of tools. Zyte is the original developer of Scrapy, the popular Python web scraping framework. The Zyte Smart Proxy is a proxy API designed to help you bypass anti-bot systems of websites.

If your target website is JavaScript-rich, the Zyte Splash tool together with Smart Proxy is a perfect match as the Splash tool can be used to render JavaScript. While the Scrapy tool is open source and free, the Smart Proxy and Splash tools are not free, and you will have to pay for each separately.


Webscraper.io

webscraper overview

The Webscraper.io tool is a Chrome browser extension that you can use to scrape social media content such as user posts, comments, and even friend lists. Any data available on any social media web page can be scraped using the Webscraper.io extension.

It uses the point and click interface as other visual scraping tools and has been made for the modern web, and as such JavaScript-heavy pages can be scraped too. It features a modular selector system that allows you to build site maps from different types of selectors, making it possible to tailor data extraction to different site structures.



Scrab.in

Scrab Overview

The Scrab tool is a highly specialized tool that has been designed for generating a lead from LinkedIn. With just a few clicks, you can start generating leads. Aside from generating leads, you can send invitations, messages and validate skills. The tool allows you to scans up to 45K profiles monthly and even allows you to delete unaccepted invitations.

It also has support for auto-follow target accounts and generates leads in an automated and segmented way. The tool is available as a Chrome extension and gets updated regularly for performance and code improvement. Scrab.in is not a free tool, but they have got support for new users to try out the service for free.


FAQs

Some popular social media scraping tools include Octoparse, ParseHub, and Import.io.

How do social media scraping tools work?

Social media scraping tools work by using the social media platform's API or website to access the data that the user wants to scrape. The tool will typically provide a user-friendly interface that allows the user to specify the data they want to scrape, and then automatically extract it from the platform.

Are social media scraping tools free?

Some social media scraping tools are free to use, while others may require a paid subscription or a one-time purchase. It is important to check the pricing and licensing details of the tool before using it to ensure that it meets your needs and budget.

The use of social media scraping tools is generally considered legal, as long as the data being scraped is publicly available and the terms of service for the social media platform allow for scraping. However, it is always important to respect the rights of social media users and not scrape data without their permission. If in doubt, it is best to consult with a legal professional before using a social media scraping tool.


Conclusion

With the availability of tools you can use to extract any content from social media pages, you will agree with me that your limit is highly dependent on your imagination, as you can do a lot with data collected from social media pages.

It is very important I stress here that if you have a custom need for scraping social media that isn’t met by any of the tools above, with a coding skill, you should be able to develop it yourself – or get someone to develop it – you shouldn’t be limited to our list or already-made tools alone.


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