Social Media Scraping Tools is a collective, constantly updated list of the best free web services where you can generate social media data from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Vkontakte, Yandex and 4shared in a matter of minutes.
With the rise of big social networks, data scraping has become an increasingly popular tool. The providers listed here offer some of the best outsourcing services for social media scraping. Data scraping is a process of automatic data extraction from websites or apps. Popular uses include web app monitoring, website auditing, web statistics reporting, product comparison, etc.
Octoparse
As one of the best free automatic web scraping tools in the market, Octoparse was developed for non-coders to accommodate complicated web scraping jobs.
The current Octoparse Version 8 has a brand new auto-detection algorithm that selects data for you automatically. It also provides an intuitive point-and-click interface and supports dealing with infinite scrolling, log-in authentication, text input (for scraping searching results), as well as clicking through drop-down menus. Scrapped data can be exported as Excel, JSON, HTML, or to databases. If you want to create a dynamic scraper to extract data from dynamic websites in real-time, Octoparse Cloud Extraction (paid plan) works well for getting dynamic data feeds as it supports the extraction schedule as frequently as every 1 min.
For scraping social media data, Octoparse already published many elaborated tutorials, like scraping tweets from Twitter and extracting posts from Instagram. In addition, Octoparse offers a data collection service that delivers the data right to your S3 bucket. If you are tight on time, it may be a good alternative to consider.
Read its customer stories to get an idea of how web scraping enhances businesses.
Dexi.io
As a web-based app, Dexi.io is another intuitive extraction automation tool for commercial purposes with a starting price of $119/month. Dexi.io supports creating three kinds of robots: extractor, crawler, and Pipes.
Dexi.io does require some programming skills to master, but you can integrate third-party services for captcha solving, cloud storage, text analysis (MonkeyLearn service integration), and even with AWS, Google Drive, Google Sheets…
Addon (paid plan) is also a revolutionary feature of Dexi.io and the number of add-ons is still growing. Through add-ons, you could unlock more features available in Extractor and Pipes.
OutWit Hub
Unlike Octoparse and Dexi.io, Outwit Hub offers a simplistic graphic user interface, as well as sophisticated scraping functions and data structure recognition. Outwit Hub started as a Firefox addon and has later turned into a downloadable App.
With no prior programming background required, OutWit Hub can extract and export links, email addresses, RSS news and data tables to Excel, CSV, HTML or SQL databases.
Outwit Hub has an outstanding “Fast Scrape” features, which quickly scrapes data from a list of URLs that you feed in. For beginners though, you might need to go through some random tutorials and documentation as the scraping App lacks a point-and-click interface.
Zyte
Zyte is a cloud-based web crawling platform that allows you to scale your crawlers and offers a smart downloader to work around bot countermeasures, turn-key web scraping services, and off-the-shelf datasets.
The app consists of 4 great tools: Scrapy Cloud for deploying and running web crawlers based on Python; Portia is an open-source software to extract data without coding; Splash is also an open-source JavaScript rendering tool to extract data from web pages that use JavaScript; Crawlera is a tool to avoid being blocked by websites, by crawler from multiple locations and IPs.
Instead of providing a complete suite, Zyte is a pretty complex and powerful web scraping platform in the market, not to mention each of the tools offered by Zyte is charged individually.
Phantombuster
Phantombuster is a data extraction tool that helps sales and marketing teams of all sizes to collect information from LinkedIn and Instagram.
Administrators can also schedule and automate actions like following profiles, liking posts, and sending customized messages.
They can also accept requests and interact with prospects to increase their visibility on the internet.
ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI is a proxy API that allows web scraping. It handles headless browsers, bypasses Captchas, and provides proxies.
This makes it easy to access data from social media sites with difficult to scrap. All you need to do is to parse and process the data.
Although it is not an automated tool, it takes care of an essential part of scraping. ScraperAPI was designed to protect against scraping and bot systems.
This allows you to have unlimited access to the data that interests you. In addition, it is very affordable and only charges for successful requests.
Proxycrawl Scraper API
Proxycrawl’s scraper API is designed to extract structured data from specific websites. This tool makes scraping simple as you only need to use their APIs to collect data.
You can find a lot of scrapers on their site, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as LinkedIn.
Proxycrawl offers extended features. It also provides a proxy API that works well with its extraction API to collect structured data on social media sites that are not covered by their scraper API.
Proxycrawl also offers a proxy service for businesses, as the proxy service cannot be used for personal use.
Apify
Apify is an online platform that automates everything you do through a web browser. Although the term “all your actions” may seem exaggerated, it is clear that social media automation is one area that Apify covers extensively.
Several automation tools, known as actors, are available to aid in scraping social media platforms.
These tools include Facebook Page scraper and Instagram scraper as well as YouTube scraper and Twitter scraper.
Developers created Apify actors for developers. It works with NodeJS and requires the Apify client library/module n another to use it.
This paid tool provides shared proxy services, but you can also add your proxy to prevent blockages.
Jarvee
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.
Conclusion
Whether you’re scraping Wikipedia or grabbing realtime tweets, sometimes you need more than just the social media data that the major tools scrape. For situations like this there are some specialized tools you can use to make your work easier! Here are some of the best tools on the market.