Top 5 Social Media Scraping Tools 2022
What can you do with data mined from social media?
Data mined from social media is arguably the largest and most dynamic dataset on human behavior. It offers new opportunities for social and business scientists to understand individuals, groups, and society, as well as to explore the great wealth hidden in data.
Apart from the applications mentioned above, Today’s Social Media Dataset can also be applied for:
- Customer satisfaction
After collecting customer reviews on social media, you can analyze customers’ attitudes towards a particular topic or product by measuring their tone, context, and sentiment. Tracking customer sentiment allows you to understand overall customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, as well as engagement intent. It provides information about your current and upcoming marketing campaigns.
- Target market segmentation
“A target market is a group of customers (individuals, households, or organizations), for which an organization designs, implements, and maintains a marketing mix tailored to the needs and preferences of that group,” as defined on Wikipedia. Obtaining and analyzing the social media data set lets you know who and when to market your products or services to. Finding more targeted markets helps you maximize your marketing ROI.
- Online Brand Tracking
Online brand monitoring is not just about hearing the voice of your customers but also knowing what your competitors, the press, and even influencers are saying. It’s not just about your product or service.
- Identification of market trends
Identifying market trends is key to adjusting your business strategy and keeping your business in step with upcoming changes in your industry. With the help of big data automation tools, market trend analysis is simply the comparison of industry data, through influencer tracking and posts on social media channels.
You may also like to read about10 Statistics on the Web during the Covid-19 Crisis
Top 5 social media crawlers
1. Octoparse
As one of the best web scraping tools on the market, Octoparse was developed for non-coders to cope with complex web scraping tasks.
The current version 8 has a brand new auto-detection algorithm that automatically selects data for you. It also provides an intuitive point-and-click interface and supports infinite scrolling, login authentication, text input (for scraping search results), as well as clicking in drop-down menus. Scraped data can be exported to Excel, JSON, HTML, or databases.
To fetch data from social networks, Octoparse has already published many elaborate tutorials, such as scraping tweets from Twitter and extracting posts from Instagram. Additionally, Octoparse offers a data collection service that provides the data directly. If you are short on time, this may be a good alternative to consider.
2. Dexi.io
It is another mining automation tool for business purposes with a starting price of $119/month. Dexi.io supports the creation of three types of robots: extractor, crawler, and “ELT”.
The paid plan is also a revolutionary feature of Dexi.io. With add-ons, you can unlock more features available in Extractor and Pipes.
3. OutWit Hub
Without the need for prior programming experience, OutWit Hub can extract and export links, email addresses, RSS news, and data tables to Excel, CSV, HTML or SQL databases.
Outwit Hub has outstanding “Fast Scrape” features, which quickly scrape data from a list of URLs. For beginners, you may have to follow random tutorials and documentation because the scraping app doesn’t have a point-and-click interface.
4. Scrapinghub
Scrapinghub is a cloud-based web crawling platform that lets you scale your crawlers and offers a smart downloader to bypass bot countermeasures. Turnkey web scraping services and ready-to-use datasets.
The app consists of 4 great tools: Scrapy Cloud for deploying and running Python-based web crawlers; Portia is open-source software for extracting data without coding; Splash is also an open-source JavaScript rendering tool for extracting data from web pages using JavaScript; Crawlera is a tool to avoid being blocked by websites, crawlers from multiple locations and IP addresses.
5. Parsehub
Parsehub is another no-coding scraper in the market, supporting Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It offers a graphical interface to select and extract data from JavaScript and AJAX pages. Data can be extracted from embedded comments, maps, images, timelines, and even pop-ups.
Moreover, Parsehub also has a browser-based extension to instantly kick-start your scraping task. Data can be exported in Excel, JSON or via API.
The controversial thing about Parsehub has to do with its pricing. The paid version of Parsehub starts at $149 per month, which is higher than most scraping products on the market, ex: Octoparse’s standard plan is only $89 per month for unlimited pages per exploration. There is a free plan but unfortunately limited to 200 pages and 5 scraping jobs.
Conclusion
In addition to what automatic web scraping tools can do, many social media channels now offer paid APIs for users, academics, researchers, and special organizations, such as Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg in the News Service, Twitter, and Facebook in social networks.
With the development of thriving online, social media opens up many new opportunities for your business to stand out in its field, by listening better to your customers and interacting with your potential and current customers in new ways.
