Scraping may be technical, but that doesn't mean it can't be useful for marketers. On the contrary, scraping applications can help the marketing team to manage social media channels, learn from competitors, optimize their own blog and replace tools with scraping scripts. Learn more about it here.

1. Manage your social media with scraping applications

Automate your Instagram marketing

We all know by now that not all followers are real. Many influencers and brands buy followers. But there are also other ways to grow your profile. This way you can automatically follow and unfollow people who follow the same hashtag on Instagram. Do you want to learn everything about this follow-unfollow principle? Be sure to keep an eye on us, do you want to receive updates about our blogs? Then subscribe to the newsletter.

In addition, with a simple script, you can screen Instagram profiles and collect public profile information from users that could be of interest to your company. This way you can identify bloggers and influencers that comply with certain criteria. This could be those following a specific hashtag or having a minimum number of followers.

Index Twitter profiles

Twitter is a place where news and trends can be created and spread out quickly. With scraping apps, you can look at technical profiles on Twitter that follow other technical profiles. For example, we collected data from 160 million accounts, including the most recent tweets, the bio of their Twitter profile ... You don't necessarily have to do anything with this data right away. Yet, if it ever comes in handy, you do have a lot of information that is ready on a server.

Growth hack LinkedIn

Another growth hack hot zone is on LinkedIn. With scraping software you can, for example, add all CEOs on LinkedIn. Then you wait a day and send them a personal message. Depending on their answer, you can send them a reply in bulk or one by one. There are also Chrome plug-ins that can help you with this.

Scraping only becomes really powerful when you start combining it with other automation."
 -Timothy Verhaeghe

Just think of entire workflows that you can automate thanks to the data you have obtained. Autopilot is a tool that you will certainly be able to get started!

2. Collect market information

Estimate your competitors

This purpose of scraping is very underestimated. In fact, you should index all of your competitors on a daily basis. What products do they sell? Which webshops are there? Or take it a step further and build a price scraper: how much do their products or services cost?

Crawling for marketing purposes: a very important scraping application. For example, an indexing of a team page can tell you whether employees are leaving or joining. That way you know whether a company is growing or shrinking. You can closely monitor your competitors.

Optimize your blog

You can also gain inspiration through scraping. You can perfectly scrape all data from a competitor's blogs. This gives you an overview of:

• Title of the blog with associated URL
• The author's name
• The number of characters in the blog
• And how many times the blog has already been shared-liked and commented on various social media channels.

You gain insights into which topics are doing well with your potential customers. How long are the blogs that are often shared? Are certain topics more popular than others? And always remember:

3. Replace tools that disappear yourself

An example of this is Facebook Graph Search. With Facebook Graph Search you could search specifically for Facebook profiles. Different parameters and characteristics determined which results, or rather profiles, you would see. These preferences were very broad. This could be the linguistic area, but also the place of residence or personal interests.

You could also search for specific photos or pages. It even went so far that you could see when a user had been at a particular location. Every story has two sides, of course. That is no different here. Graph Search was soon misused. For example, people were extremely targeted with advertising.

Despite the software's popularity with journalists and researchers, Facebook Graph Search officially no longer exists. The interface itself no longer works, but the API would still allow 'calls'. Scraping could replace this tool perfectly.

The creepy graph search itself still exists but is now less accessible and more difficult to use"
- Inti De Ceukelaire (@securinti)

4. Gain data insights

Scraping creates data. Data in turn provides insights and thanks to the right insights, we can make the right decisions. This way we can prove which marketing campaigns generate money.

"In God we trust, all others have to bring data" 
W.Edward Deming

In snack format

What can a marketer do with scraping?

* Social media management: automation (plug-ins) for LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. You can follow specific # 's, automatically like, connect with profiles, collect public profile information ...

* Competitive analyzes: what does your competitors' webshop look like? Scrape team pages to know if a business is growing or shrinking.

* Blogging: scrape your competitors' blogs and know what topics you will need to write about to be successful.

* Replace tools that disappear with your own scraping scripts.

* Gain insights through data.