Web scraping has become a buzzword in this world of data-driven marketing. Businesses now need a lot of data in respective fields to operate better. And the best way to collect this huge amount of data is web scraping. From lead generation to market research, web scraping has a lot of crucial use cases.
Social media scraping, more specifically, Instagram scraping, helps businesses improve their branding online. It is commonly done by a pre-built or custom Instagram scraper. Learn more about how to scrape Instagram and what tools you can use on Proxyway.
Contents of Post
What Is Web Scraping?
In simple words, web scraping means collecting data from websites. For example, you might need to monitor the price of various stocks. Collecting stock data one by one can be hectic and time-consuming. If you use web scrapers, the tools will gather all the necessary data for you in custom formats. As a result, analyzing the data becomes much easier.
How Web Scraping Works?
For a web scraper tool to work, you need to input the target URL into the tool. It will fetch the HTML and other elements on the page so that you can select what data to extract. After selecting the data type, the tool will extract data from the target webpage.
The extracted data is then exported into the desired format. In most cases, web scrapers will export data into CSV formats. Advanced tools can export data to other formats, such as JSON. Choosing the right type of tool for web scraping is crucial.
What Are the Use Cases of Web Scraping?
Collecting real-time data is probably the biggest purpose of data scraping. It has a lot of popular use cases including the following.
- Lead Generation
Generating leads or prospects in the traditional method isn’t that efficient. Instead, businesses commonly use web scraping to generate quality leads. Web scraping tools can quickly attract a myriad of data, including emails, phone numbers, etc. So, businesses can reach out to more prospects for promoting their products or services.
- Social Media/Instagram Scraping
With a surge in the popularity of social media, such as Facebook or Instagram, brands are now focusing on building their online image. And contacting the right influencer for effective promotion is a big part of that. Social media also helps businesses understand market trends.
So, businesses commonly use Instagram Scraper to collect data about top influencers, industry trends, and more. Depending on the businesses, various Instagram scraper tools are used to collect publicly available data, such as hashtags, profiles, and posts.
- Price Monitoring
Competitive pricing is key to gaining more attention in a specific market. Businesses need to stay on top of every little pricing information going on in the industry. And web scraping is the most convenient way of collecting price information.
This way, businesses can get real-time pricing information, that too in a very short time. New opportunities can also be identified through price monitoring.
- Brand Monitoring
Having a solid online presence is crucial for any business in today’s world. And the best way of monitoring brand activity is through web scraping. Businesses can collect a lot of useful data, such as ad analytics, engagement data, etc., to better understand the direction of the brand and forecast the growth.
More impactful decisions can be made with the help of scraped data. Identifying crises and developing strategies to tackle them also become easier with web scraping.
- Real Estate Monitoring
The real estate industry has been booming in recent years. So, agencies need to keep up with all the relevant data, such as price, property details, customer base, and more. Web scraping is the perfect way of collecting massive data from various websites.
With web scraping, agencies can easily identify the demand for specific property types, localities, and other factors. So, they can develop better marketing strategies that engage potential customers.
What Tools Can You Use for Web Scraping?
Web scraping tools come in different types. For your convenience, we have a list of the most common scraping tools here. Check it out.
- Pre-built scraper
- Custom-built scraper
- Browser Extensions
- Scraping software
- Command line scrapers
- Cloud-based scrapers
Conclusion
Web scraping makes it much easier to collect enormous data in multiple parameters. With the collected data, businesses can make more informed decisions. And this helps them steer on the right course for improved progress.
Social media scraping, especially Instagram scraping, is one of the most common use cases of it. From monitoring market trends to building online brands, Instagram scraping helps businesses a lot.
