Choosing the best social media web scraping tools

1.Build your own web scraper

With some programming knowledge, you can build your own web scraping tool. One way is to use a web scraping library or framework.

Python based web scraping and scraping frameworks such as Selenium or Scrapy can handle complex automation on well-protected social media platforms. You can also use web scraping libraries such as BeautifulSoup, Cheerio or Puppeteer, but they are usually not sufficient for the complete scraping process.

The biggest advantage of creating your own tools is that you can customize them to suit your needs. When maintaining a scraping tool, you can adapt it to frequent platform structure changes and include features that work well with dynamic elements (JavaScript, AJAX). However, the more advanced you want your scraper to be, the more programming knowledge you will need.

2. Purchase off-the-shelf web scraping tools

Codeless scraping tools do not require any code to be written. This means that you can scrape social media platforms without any programming knowledge.

Knowlesys Intelligence System is a comprehensive social media monitoring system. It is developed based the world's leading open source intelligence extraction technology, with the advantages of quick identification and full coverage. It enables users to monitor the whole Internet, including social media(Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram...), traditional websites (Forum, Chat Room, News...) and dark web in a timely manner.

3. Using APIs

Web scraping tools are not the only tools available for collecting data from the web. You can also use APIs.

Some social media platforms - Reddit, Pinterest, YouTube - offer their own APIs. Instagram, on the other hand, closed its API, and TikTok doesn't bother to offer an API. However, the official scrape API has some limitations.

Different platforms apply rate limits - the number of elements (tweets, comments, etc.) you can retrieve in a given time frame. In short - you will not be able to scrape large amounts of data. You will be required to have an account.

In addition, social media networks have strict requirements on the type of data you can extract. For example, YouTube allows you to retrieve synopses related to videos, users, and playlists. For any other element, you will need to consider unofficial APIs that support proxy rotation in order to access more data with fewer restrictions.