In today’s time and age, social media is rocking. People spend great deal of their time on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and others, connecting with people and checking notifications is a new trend. On the other hand, social media has given new directions to businesses and has given new business opportunities. For businesses to not to miss these opportunities, an organized database is prime necessity. This is where web scraping tools work the best for businesses.web data scraping provides you with the best information and insights to make your business remarkable.
Tips to get social media data trough web scraping
Check out these ways to scrape social media data.
Cache pages that you visit for web scraping
You got to cache the web pages that you visit for scraping, especially the big websites. This is how you will not put load on the website time and time again. When you start things all over again, that page won’t be required again for scraping the data that you are in need. While scraping, you need to ensure that you take into account all the measures that prevent you from being caught and blocked.
Keep things slow, don’t rush on the website with plethora of requests
Big websites are big for some solid reasons and they have algorithms to track web scraping. When you will send large number of requests, you can be caught easily as your IP address will remain the same and your IP can get blacklisted immediately. You need to make sure to have some gap in your requests, make sure to give a feel of human behavior.
Store fetched URLs
You must keep the list of URLs that have already been fetched; you can keep in database or a key value store. You will never want the scraper to crash after fetching 70 or 80 percent of data. It takes a lot of bandwidth to fetch that remaining data and you need to ensure that you store these URLs.
Split scraping process in different phases
Gathering data is tricky, if you are fetching great deal of data from a big website, you need to make sure that you split data in different phases. It is always safe and easy to scrape data in segments. In first segment, you can scrape website URLs and in the second segment, you can download the content.
Get what’s needed
Don’t take what’s needed and visit only the websites that are required for you. It can make things difficult if you have data that is unnecessary. Obtain useful data so that you have well organized and useful data.
