What Is Social Scraping?

It’s been a long time since social networks became an all-embracing platform that goes way beyond serving as a substitute for real socialization. In fact, by becoming as real as any other form of social life, they made us reconsider what real socialization means.

Billions of people use social media daily for various purposes and are available online to anyone that tries to reach them. It automatically makes these platforms good databases for business marketing.

Everybody who is somebody in the world of business is using at least some of the major social media. 71% of small-to-midsize businesses use it for marketing purposes and find it useful. Yet, they must find their paths through this huge mass of worldwide users.

Such a huge base of users is too big for any business to work directly with. That’s where social scraping comes into the picture.

The core idea

Social scraping is extracting data from people’s behavior and their produced content on social media for marketing purposes. The same can be done by inspecting what other businesses do on social media and singling out what works for them, thus making yourself a better competitor.

You need social scraping because you can’t target everyone, for there are too many people with inordinately different interests. Your ads, messages, or whatever ways you use for seeking your target people will get lost amidst the flow of all kinds of stuff in social media. 

The main goal of social scraping is to identify and discern people or groups that are direct targets of your business interests, and how their interests can be approached by identifying the patterns of their choices and their grounds.

The efficiency of social scraping stems from the fact that people’s buying decisions are heavily influenced by social media:

• 81% admit that posts of their friends or family members impacted their purchases,
• 78% is influenced by social media posts of companies,
• 74% generally base their buying decisions on social media.

Again, by targeting everyone you can reach only some of those that can be interested in your product or services. It makes more sense to target only those that are interested and work around their preferences so that more of them would pay attention to what you are offering.

How to make use of it?

Social media is the place where people pour their hearts out about everything they hate and love. Their shares, likes, posts, comments, and every action they take on the media indicate their deepest interests, tastes, tendencies that they give themselves up to.

By going through popular posts, discussions, and hashtags, you can discern what people think about particular ideas or products. It helps to decide whether it’s worth starting a new ad campaign based on certain ideas or to go in a different direction.

The success of your business strategy overall depends on market trends. Social media is also the best way to identify them and make necessary corrections for the best results.

In addition, you must constantly monitor your own branding. Social media provides you a direct connection with your customers, their joys, and their frustrations. It means that you must maintain your communication with them which involves lots of interactions both through messages and comments. Selecting where and whom to give a response that makes any benefits might seem like a headache, not to mention the very task of commenting.

All this work doesn’t have to consume all our time and resources though. Many businesses these days use various automation tools that help scrape social media at a faster pace and fulfill a multitude of tasks that can’t be encompassed manually.

Software tools like Jarvee or WhiteHatBox allow you to manage and analyze your interactions with your customers on social media. Such tools can help you make a good segmentation of target users and their interests, thus making your marketing much easier.

Some obstacles

As much as social scraping is useful for marketing, it is significantly restricted when your social scraping becomes too extensive or enhanced by various automation tools. The latter are banned by most of the sites on the internet, social media included.

The consequences for the users of such tools are similar – they often get banned too.

Automation tools are usually blocked because they allow ingenuine repetitive activity together with greater abilities to snoop around other users or businesses. Social media platforms don’t approve such software and block it regularly.

You can get blocked even without using such tools if you are marketing too extensively and employ, for instance, multiple accounts and spy on other users.

Defeating obstacles

Despite all the obstacles, social media scraping with all its advantages is not going to stop. Neither should you.

Using automation tools, like any other suspicious activity, is mostly identified through the IP address of their user. Hence, the solution is simple – you need to change or disguise your IP address.

Proxy servers that work as intermediaries between the user and the internet are invoked by businesses for this purpose. Residential proxies do the job particularly well, for they provide you with IP addresses that come from household devices.

Different actions that are suspicious for their repetitiveness or unusual speed are linked by the same IP address. You are being identified and blocked based on that. Residential proxies for social media let you change your IP address and keep it for an extended period before changing once again, thus making it difficult to link your or your tool’s different actions.

You can make your way through all limitations by using proxies and reducing the risk of getting blocked for using social platforms to get the best marketing strategies.

Wrapping-up

Social scraping is arguably the best way for online marketing. Since the influence of social media is not going to decline and most likely will even expand, social scraping with its automation tools and essential workarounds such as proxies is going to adapt even more and play an even bigger role for big and small brands alike.