Businesses scrape data from Instagram every day. With over 1 billion monthly active users on the site, Instagram data scraping can provide you with reach datasets. Whether your business is B2B or B2C, you can benefit from the data you scrap.
You can scrape specific user data, such as:
⦁ Email
⦁ Contact phone
⦁ User ID
⦁ Bios
⦁ Hashtags
⦁ Comments
⦁ Locations
⦁ Followers
⦁ Following accounts
Your company can benefit from Instagram data scraping in several ways.
1. Identify Trends
Trends are an important part of business. What is your target market interested in? How do you get your pictures, videos and stories in front of the right users? Trends allow you to find your target market and what they’re searching for most often.
Hashtags scraping provides in-depth information:
⦁ The number of times people post using a specific hashtag
⦁ Post-performance for specific tags
⦁ Potential reach of a specific tag
⦁ Engagement rate of hashtags
Identifying trends enables you to make posts that have a better chance of being:
⦁ Viewed
⦁ Liked
⦁ Engaged with
When you use social media scraping, you’re refining your marketing efforts to ensure that you’re marketing to your audience using the right hashtags and following emerging trends. Once you’ve identified the trends that put your business in front of your target audience, you can begin creating a content plan to achieve your social media goals. You can use trends to drive leads to your business, find potential business partners or increase your following. Trends may be short-lived, but if followed properly, you can boost your business in the process.
2. Target Local Users
Depending on your business, you may need only local users. For example, let’s assume you’re a law firm that works only in a specific region. Potential clients that are outside of your service area shouldn’t be promoted to.
Instead, when scraping data on Instagram, it’s possible to:
⦁ Target users by specific location
⦁ Target the followers or people followed by users
Targeting local users is a good choice for brick-and-mortar businesses. A few businesses, and the list can go well beyond what’s listed, can include:
⦁ Doctors
⦁ Dentists
⦁ Law firms
⦁ Restaurants
⦁ Dog groomers
⦁ Home repair
⦁ Construction companies, etc.
Local users may also recommend their friends or family to your business. Once you have a list of local users, you can start following them or engaging with them in other ways. You can also use this list of users and add filters to hyper-target potential leads.
Marketing or catering to different local users can be more accurate when you know where the users are located. Regional marketing or adding special posts that cater to these potential leads is a very powerful form of marketing that can lead to higher leads and conversion rates.
3. Learn More About Your Target Audience
Scraping data is all about gaining an insight into your audience. Marketing has improved greatly in the last decade as big data has grown. Thanks to technology used to “make sense” out of this data, it’s possible to learn more about your target audience than ever before.
The data can determine:
⦁ Hashtags your audience uses most often
⦁ Level of engagement among your audience
⦁ Age and gender of the most active users
⦁ How frequently your audience posts
⦁ Competitors your audience is following
⦁ Follows and followers of your audience
When you know more about your target audience, you’re able to engage them further with posts that are refined to get likes, comments and shares. Every audience has certain posts that they’re more engaged with – it’s a fact.
If your business knows more about its target market, it can help:
⦁ Determine the path of your marketing
⦁ Reveal potential ways to reach your target audience
⦁ Uncover areas where marketing efforts may be wasted
You can also collect data from profiles to create a list of potential business websites or contact information that allows you to reach out to your audience off social media. The more you know about your audience, the better you’ll be able to reach your audience.
4. See What Your Competitors are Doing
Competitors provide a gold mine of information. When you scrape the information of your competitors, especially larger competitors, you can use this information to your advantage. You can also learn from your smaller competitors, too.
What You’ll Learn from Larger Competitors
Larger competitors often have bigger audiences and solid relationships in the industry. You can use this information that you collect to learn what the competitor is doing right and wrong. The information you may gather includes:
⦁ Posts that are working now
⦁ Posts that worked well in the past and not well now
⦁ Users to follow
⦁ Users that are most engaged
⦁ Hashtags to use
You can also scrape the followers of these competitors, follow them and generate new leads in the process.
What You’ll Learn from Smaller Competitors
A smaller competitor is often overlooked because they’re less of a threat. These competitors often have a smaller or similar market share compared to your business. But it’s these competitors that are:
⦁ Innovative in their market
⦁ Innovate with their products or services
⦁ Gaining market share
It’s important to see where and how these smaller competitors are gaining their audience. It’s possible that these competitors are unlocking methods you’re not using to increase your reach and make more sales.
Competitors do some of the work and trial and error for you. Take time to scrape and analyze their data to determine how you can better improve your product, marketing and engagement.
5. Expand Your Follower Base
Scraping Instagram data can help you expand your followers and your targeted audience. The ability to scrape by followers and following can help you identify potential accounts to follow. These are people who may be interested in your brand and what you have to offer.
Just enter any user name – this could be a competitor or one of your own followers – and obtain a list of their followers and following. You can do this for business profile scraping to learn more about your competitors, or just as a way to find new people to follow. With this information in hand, you can find new accounts to follow, and many of those accounts are people or other brands that will engage with your brand. Instagram data scraping will also provide you with more detailed information about these followers.
You can also scrape users by hashtags, so if you don’t have a specific user in mind, you can still scrape to find relevant users who will be interested in your account.
User data can be used for other purposes, too. For example, you can learn more about your target audience’s location, hobbies, emails, phone numbers, business categories and locations on Instagram. This data can help you better target your ideal customer in your marketing campaigns.
Expanding your follower base will help you build your brand and expand your reach. It also helps ensure that your follower base is relevant and targeted, so your audience is more likely to engage with your content and interact with your brand.
6. Find Inspiration for New Content
Data scraping can help you find inspiration for new content to post on your own account. You can download Instagram stories and scrape Instagram user data with the touch of a button. Once you’re done scraping, you can analyze the content, identify trends and get ideas for your own content.
Posts that have the most likes are more likely to be well received by your followers. Posting similar content or putting your own spin on an idea can help you fill your feed with new and engaging posts. You can also see what hashtags followers are using when posting photos and videos, so you know what type of content they prefer.
Use the data you scrape to create a content calendar filled with your inspired ideas. You can continue using your scraper to find an endless supply of content ideas. You can scrape by hashtags to come up with fun and interesting content ideas for your blog. For example, you can gather posts with the hashtag #hiking in Australia to find the most popular hiking spots in the country. Along with hashtags, you can scrape locations to better target your posts and content. The data you scrape from Instagram can be used for content creation on all of your social accounts as well as blogs, infographics, case studies and guest posts.
7. Face Recognition Technologies or ML/AI
One least explored and controversial use cases of Instagram data scraping is for facial recognition technologies. It is important to note that while it is possible to use scraping for this purpose, Facebook – owner of Instagram – has sent cease and desist letters to companies that use scraping for this purpose.
Although Instagram scraping for facial recognition purposes is generally frowned upon, you can use it for machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) purposes.
Instagram data scraping can be used for purposes, from marketing to building your following, content creation and even product improvement. You can scrape business emails from Instagram accounts, or gather information about users that are following your competitors. Having all of this data on hand can help you create better marketing campaigns and build your brand online.
