Audience scraping from social networks: saving on advertising
Today, social networks have become one of the most effective, convenient and low-cost platforms for business development in terms of material investments. With their help, you can quickly and easily launch a new product or brand on the market, attract an audience to your online store, and more. Advertising is often used to achieve this goal. Business representatives allocate certain funds for it, set up impressions through the advertising account, put a lot of effort into setting a bunch of various parameters, from gender, socio-demographic and geographical location, to interests, age. Then the algorithm works on its own, showing your ad to those users who match the characteristics you specified. But what is the effect of the actions taken?
Practice shows that gradually the number of customers attracted by such advertising is decreasing. And this despite the fact that the budget is systematically increasing. Already today it can be called the norm who, that time passes, and there are not enough impressions. First of all, this is due to the fact that the activity of users of social networks leaves much to be desired. It turns out that real people really belong to different thematic communities and quite fit the description of the target audience that you asked. So what's the problem? Because they don't buy anything. And the problem can have a banal source: a person simply lost interest in social networks. Accordingly, he simply does not see your ad.
Now let's take a closer look at how to ensure a stable flow of the target audience to your site from social networks, but at the same time cut off offers, bots, ensure that the database of potential customers is uploaded directly to the advertising account, and optimize advertising costs using parsing audience. We will tell you what this procedure is, how legal it is. We will identify the main market trends, features of the target audience. Here are some recommendations that will allow you to increase your subscriber base and more. We will tell you how to ensure the most functional and stable work with social networks using mobile proxies.
What is social media scraping
Parsing social networks — a fairly simple and fast way to extract important information about the target audience from a huge amount of data. Specialists in the performance of these works use the term "parsing", although this is not quite the correct name. Here we are talking about one of the stages of scraping, which involves collecting information in order to extract the necessary information from it. This work is carried out inside the corresponding software, and then it is manually uploaded to ready-made databases or immediately included in the API process. An Application Programming Interface (API) is software designed to communicate with other applications that were not originally designed to work together.
At first glance, it may seem that all this is in no way related to parsing, but it is not. The fact is that if you decide to connect to the API, you can automate the following tasks:
- Real-time data collection, which will be especially useful in the case of working with social networks, in which trends and trends change very quickly, including dramatically.
- Setting up an automatic data collection funnel. Alternatively, such funnels can compare conversion transitions to the target action for a particular content, thereby determining what exactly is interesting to the user, what is not.
- Transfer data directly to your database or analytics software without requiring human intervention.
That is, if you additionally connect an API to the parsing tool, who will be able to collect information as quickly as possible and transfer it directly to other software, in particular to your database. And this solution automates the installation of requests to clean up the database after a certain period of time. Moreover, configured via API parsing will work even if when you are not at work.
How legal would such actions be?
Yes, the expression "collecting data about the target audience" does not sound very legitimate, but, nevertheless, such actions will not violate any laws. The fact is that in this case, the program simply automates what you would have to collect manually, in particular those user data that are open to the public. That is, only the information that the user himself provided to the public is used.
Although there are still a number of limitations here. But they depend on what goal the person involved in parsing sets for himself. Nobody forbids collecting popular content, including copyrighted content. But to use it without the appropriate permission of the owner — it's already illegal. That is, you can't:
- use data obtained by parsing for plagiarism or spam;
- load the server with parsers so much that it will cause a banal site crash;
- distribute personal user data, including that which is in the public domain.
That is, if you collect information without any malicious intent, do not plan to sell it to the public, if your task is only to improve the content of your own resource and save the budget of advertising campaigns, then no one forbids you to use parsing social networks.
Now let's take a closer look at what you can get if you decide to use social media scraping tools.
What does scraping social networks do?
Using social network parsing in your work, you can automate the following production tasks:
- Reveal market trends.
- Target a local audience.
- Find out the most detailed information about your target audience.
- Study the actions of competitors.
- Increase your subscriber base.
Let's consider all these points in more detail.
Revealing market trends
The effectiveness of business development directly depends on how comprehensively and in detail you will be familiar with the trends of your market niche. It will always be useful for you to know what exactly your target audience is interested in at a given time and what trends are emerging in the market. Alternatively, on the eve of the New Year holidays, potential buyers are looking for gifts. This is understandable and logical. But perhaps this year people are interested in a particular thing. And if you do not provide it to the market, then your competitor will do it, earning a considerable amount of money on this.
What about parsing? The fact is that the most detailed information can be obtained by scanning and collecting information from hashtags in the same Instagram or any other social network. By analyzing this information, you can find out:
- number of posts containing a particular hashtag, as well as which people use it;
- the effectiveness of the selected hashtags, namely, how the representatives of the target audience interact using this hashtag;
- possible coverage of a specific hashtag.
That is, if you identify the hashtag that will be most effective and popular on a social network, use it in your material, then it is highly likely that the maximum number of people will read or bookmark this post.
Along with hashtags, you can also start collecting posts from competitors or clients that would be perfect for your target audience. Thanks to this, you will be able to find out what kind of content your target audience is most interested in and is able to cause a sincere response from them to your product. You can use the information received not only to attract customers, but also to increase the number of subscribers on your pages, search for new partners.
But in all this, it is important to understand that — this thing is unstable. They are constantly in motion, so it is very important to monitor them in real time.
Targeting a local audience
Most of the business is primarily focused on the target audience, located in close proximity to the location of the store itself. This will be especially relevant for companies that operate offline. In particular, sports complexes, entertainment and shopping centers, law firms, flower shops, restaurants, dentistry, etc. That is, if your work is carried out only in one region, then why waste time, resources and money on attracting an audience, located outside your service area. The fact that they will know about you as the best restaurant in Saratov somewhere in Vladivostok will bring you nothing but recognition.
Using social media scraping, you can personalize ads, which can significantly increase the effectiveness of marketing. As a result, the conversion rate and the number of attracted customers improve. That is, in this case, it is necessary to parse users from a specific geolocation, as well as people that your audience is subscribed to. In the latter case, launching advertising among them will help transform potential customers into those who actually come to you for a purchase.
In any case, targeting the local target audience — this is the best solution for local business. When you have a database of local potential customers, you will be able to control their profiles on social networks, as well as interact with them, including using targeted advertising, mailing lists, personal offers, etc. And, of course, not it is worth forgetting about such an effective and powerful tool as word of mouth. In a certain region, it can give amazing results, and it's completely free.
In addition, the local audience can be filtered by a number of criteria. This will not only allow you to sort out only the group whose representatives will match your buyer profile, but also set the right tone of conversation in order to attract attention. All this becomes real thanks to the rather wide functionality of parsing tools, including those that are able to automatically segment data from social networks.
Getting to know your target audience
The more you know about your target audience, the more individual product you can offer them. Along with the usual data collection, scraping will allow you to find out a number of other information to build the most comprehensive picture of potential buyers.
We are talking about defining parameters such as:
- age and gender of the most active users;
- most used hashtags;
- level of engagement of potential customers;
- frequency of posting new messages to the audience;
- following your audience, as well as those who follow it.
It will also be possible to identify promising competitors. Being well-versed in all these moments, you will be able to offer the target audience the most interesting and informative content for them, which will contribute to getting likes, pausing comments, reposts. That is, data parsing will allow you to choose the optimal format for communicating with each audience. Thanks to this, you will be able to determine the tools to cover the widest possible segment of the consumer market, select key areas for marketing. It is also easy to identify those areas where work will be pointless, namely, all the effort and money invested here is wasted.
Studying the actions of competitors
Competitors — it is a treasure trove of valuable information for your business. All the data that you get in the process of parsing them, you can use when developing a subsequent strategy for developing your business. It is noteworthy that you can learn from both large and fairly small companies operating in the same market niche as you.
Thus, major market players already have a certain weight in one area or another. By analyzing their work, you can understand what is right in your strategy and what should be abandoned. In particular, you can identify relevant hashtags for business development, find the most active subscribers, get acquainted with posts that give the highest possible results, as well as those technologies that are no longer relevant today. Moreover, by starting parsing the subscribers of such a competitor, you can easily find similar audiences on social networks, thereby expanding the base of potential customers for your business.
Many business representatives underestimate small competitors. On the one hand, why waste time and effort on them if they do not pose any threat to your business. But on the other hand, they are trying to break out in their market segment, which means they use various modern solutions. So why not take a look at the innovations and maybe take some notes for yourself. And this solution will be relevant in the case when you are trying to promote a new product with minimal investment. At least out of curiosity, you can see exactly where small competitors find their target audience.
By parsing competitors, you can avoid the mistakes that they have already made in practice. The path that they took by trial, you can simply exclude by performing complex data analysis. This work will also positively affect the development of a business development strategy and improve interaction with representatives of the target audience.
Increasing the subscriber base
So, it will be enough for you to simply enter a link to the account of a certain user in the parsing program to get a complete list of his subscribers, find other people who may be interested in your product or service. Similarly, it will be possible to check the business profile of a competitor to find out as much valuable information about him as possible.
Also using social media scraping you can determine:
- geolocation of the target audience;
- phone numbers;
- preferences and hobbies;
- categories of business that attract them;
- email.
Knowing all this information, you will make your advertising campaign as targeted and targeted as possible, which will allow you to avoid significant material costs and at the same time guarantee a high result. And remember: personalization always has a positive effect on conversions. Having correctly built a strategy based on the data received, you can find an audience that will be really interested in your products or services. The one that will consciously interact with your brand. The so-called "hot" target audience segments will always generate cheaper leads, clicks and lead to higher sales.
One of the best solutions on the social media audience scraping software market — Pepper.Ninja app. We invite you to follow the link to get acquainted with its functionality and settings.
But, in any case, scraping social networks — this is a multi-threaded action. And if it is installed by anti-fraud systems, then with a very high degree of probability your account on the same Facebook, Odnoklassniki, VKontakte will be immediately blocked. And often without the possibility of recovery. To avoid this, we suggest additionally connecting mobile proxies from the MobileProxy.Space service to work. In this case, you will get a reliable intermediary who will replace your data with his own in the process, thereby forming a digital identity that has nothing to do with you. For more information about the functions and capabilities of mobile proxies, we suggest that you familiarize yourself with the link https://mobileproxy.space/en/user.html?buyproxy.
With such mobile proxies, you will ensure a high level of security and confidentiality of your work on the network, you will be able to effectively bypass regional blocking, work simultaneously with multiple accounts, use programs for data parsing, and more. Moreover, each of you can earn on a proxy: a stable additional income will not be superfluous for anyone.
