How to Scrape Social Media Data in 2025

Social media data is among the most valuable resources that data-driven businesses use today. That said, scraping social platforms isn't as easy as it sounds. We'll show you how, including the top 9 tools successful businesses use.

• ZenRows: Best social media scraping tool.
• Octoparse.
• ScrapeStorm.
• PhantomBuster.
• ParseHub.
• Social Searcher.
• Webz.io.
• Heepsy.
• OutScraper.

Use Cases of Social Media Scraping

Many startups now turn to social media for relevant information that can help them grow. And it's not surprising that even Fortune 500 companies aren't exempt. In fact, Hubstaff reports that 97% of them use social media for different forms of marketing.

The reasons for this dependence are obvious. Social media contains raw, unfiltered facts and honest opinions on a wide range of subjects. It's definitely one of the most trusted sources you can turn to for major business decisions based on trends and customers' expectations.

Here are some real-life use cases of social media scraping:

• Lead generation: By scraping social platforms, you can identify potential customers based on the perceptions and interests they often share through comments and posts.
• Sentiment analysis: You can also extract consumers' reviews to analyze their sentiment about a product or service. You can then use these insights to make data-driven decisions about repricing, product optimization, personalized recommendations, etc.
• Market research: The extracted social media data can help you group your markets based on perceived interests and preferences. This helps you personalize products for specific market groups.
• Competitor analysis: Social media data can offer valuable insights into your competitors' social marketing strategies. And you can even look into the topics consumers discuss. With this information, you can proactively enhance your offerings and launch high-value features or products ahead of your competitors.
• Influencer tracking: Marketers and advertising agencies collect social media data for targeted influencer marketing. For instance, you can analyze the scraped social data to reveal top social media voices significantly influencing product adoption.
• Content aggregation: Another use case is to scrape data across social platforms. You can then offer such information in real-time at a price based on specific interests.

Social Media Platforms and Supported Data You Can Get

So, what type of data can you get from social media? Let's have a look at the popular ones below.

With all that said, scraping social media content can be challenging without the appropriate tool. The next section will show you the best social media scraping tools in 2025.

Before you pick a tool, it’s worth understanding whether you should build your own scraper or use a Web Scraping API. Download our free ebook: DIY Scraping vs Web Scraping API to compare both approaches and choose what’s right for your use case.

Best Social Media Scraping Tools to Try Out

Most social platforms use one form of anti-bot measures to prevent public data scraping. The tools recommended in this section can ease this pain and allow you to scrape without blocks.

1. ZenRows: Best Social Media Scraping Tool

The ZenRows Universal Scraper API is an all-in-one web scraping solution for bypassing anti-bot measures and handling dynamic rendering with almost zero technicalities. Other users strongly recommend it, with an excellent G2 review score of 5.0/5.0. ZenRows offers an unparalleled success rate of more than 99.93%, allowing uninterrupted access to scrape your desired social data at scale.

ZenRows also provides rotating residential proxies with geo-targeting. Since most social platforms serve content based on regions, you can use this feature to extract content tailored to specific countries. This ensures you can collect social data beyond regional boundaries, regardless of location.

Let's quickly see how ZenRows' Universal Scraper API works by scraping this Reddit page.

Sign up to open the Request Builder. Paste the target URL in the link box and activate Premium Proxies and JS Rendering.

Select your preferred programming language (e.g., Python in this case) and choose the API connection mode. Copy the generated code and paste it into your scraper.

The generated Python code should look like this:

# pip3 install requests
import requests

url = "https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/"
apikey = "<YOUR_ZENROWS_API_KEY>"
params = {
    "url": url,
    "apikey": apikey,
    "js_render": "true",
    "premium_proxy": "true",
}
response = requests.get("https://api.zenrows.com/v1/", params=params)
print(response.text)

The above code bypasses the anti-bot challenge and outputs the protected site's full-page HTML, as shown:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en-US" class="theme-...">
  <head>
    <title>midjourney</title>
    <!-- ... -->
    <link rel="dns-prefetch" href="https://www.redditstatic.com/">
    <!-- ... -->
  </head>
  <body>
    <form autocomplete="off" action="/r/midjourney/search/?q=" class="reddit-search-bar ...">
      <!-- ... -->
    </form>

    <span class="lowercase ...">
      <faceplate-number number="1745164" pretty="">
        <!---->1.7M
      </faceplate-number> members
    </span>

    <div class="flex ...">
      <!-- ... -->
      <span class="lowercase ...">
        <faceplate-number number="68" pretty="">
          <!---->68
        </faceplate-number> online
      </span>
    </div>

    <!-- ... -->
  </body>
</html>

Awesome! 🎉 You just used ZenRows to bypass an advanced anti-bot protection. You can now say goodbye to getting blocked during data collection!

👍 Pros

• It has a high success rate at bypassing CAPTCHAs and other anti-bots.
• ZenRows offers a beginner-friendly API.
• It integrates easily with any programming language.
• You get predictable pricing that scales with your needs.
• It's highly scalable and suitable for small- and enterprise-level scraping needs.
• It offers geo-targeting to scrape social content without regional limitations.
• ZenRows integrates easily with automation tools like Clay for a no-code scraping experience.

👎 Cons

• ZenRows relies on external workflow tools for no-code automation.

💲 Pricing

• It starts at $69/month. Free trial available.

2. Octoparse

Octoparse captures the attention of no-code web scrapers with its zero-code and AI-powered workflows. It has various scraping templates for popular social platforms, including Twitter(X), YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, and TikTok. These templates let you access your target platform quickly with little effort. The only caveat is that Octoparse is strictly no-code. So, it gives you less control over how you collect and store data.

👍 Pros

• Its no-code offering makes it more beginner-friendly.
• Octoparse has pre-built social scraper templates to collect data easily.
• You can install Octoparse as a desktop application.
• It has good automation features, like scheduling.

👎 Cons

• The strict no-code approach offers less flexibility.
• The desktop application is only available for Windows users.

💲 Pricing

• Starts at $99/month. Free trial available.

3. ScrapeStorm

ScrapeStorm is an AI-powered scraping platform with a desktop app for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Its point-and-click approach makes web scraping easy, allowing you to extract content visually within the website's graphical user interface (GUI). It also offers powerful features like scheduling, IP rotation, and Smart Mode for automatic parsing. There's also a CAPTCHA-solving feature. However, this is sometimes ineffective against more advanced anti-bot measures.

👍 Pros

• Automated scheduling is available.
• There's a CAPTCHA-solving feature.
• It has a point-and-click feature to scrape within the GUI.
• A cross-platform desktop application is available.

👎 Cons

• The GUI scraping option is unscalable.
• It gets blocked when scraping websites with advanced anti-bot protection.

💲 Pricing

• Starts at $49.99/month. Free trial available.

4. PhantomBuster

PhantomBuster provides tailored no-code automation for collecting data from various social platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter(X), Facebook, and Instagram. It features dedicated scrapers like Instagram Follower Collector, YouTube Channel Scraper, YouTube Video Extractor, and Twitter(X) Follower Collector, among others.

Beyond scraping, it lets you automate social actions like following, messaging, and commenting. It also features automated lead generation and helps you connect with leads via supported social media platforms.

👍 Pros

• It features tailored social scrapers.
• Beginner-friendly and suitable for no-code scrapers.
• Phantumbuster lets you automate social actions.
• You can scrape specific data from various social platforms.

👎 Cons

• The scraping results are limited to your social cycle.
• There's no cross-region data collection.
• The platform is heavily automated and offers low flexibility.

💲 Pricing

• Starts at $56.99/month. Free trial available.

5. ParseHub

Parsehub is another no-code GUI-based scraping platform with Windows, Linux, and Mac desktop apps. It lets you schedule runs for your scraper and automate workflows from opening the target URL to selecting your target data and downloading it as JSON or CSV. Parsehub also features JavaScript rendering and data cleaning, making it suitable for extracting targeted data points from social content.

👍 Pros

• It's available as handy desktop apps.
• ParseHub is ideal for beginners and no-code web scrapers.
• It features built-in data cleaning to get specific data points from unstructured data.
• The GUI-based scraper lets you interact with elements directly.
• You can schedule scraping jobs easily.

👎 Cons

• The strict no-code feature offers limited flexibility and scalability.
• ParseHub's scraping operation can be slow.

💲 Pricing

• Starts at $189/month. Free trial available.

6. Social Searcher

As the name suggests, Social Searcher is a social platform search engine. It indexes content from various platforms and presents the top results based on your search term. Featured social media sites include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter(X), and LinkedIn. You can search by hashtags, names, mentions, and trends.

The main highlight is the monitoring feature, which lets you scrape data continuously from connected social platforms based on your search. It also allows you to save your searches for referencing and tracking. You can also view sentiments directly from the analytics dashboard.

👍 Pros

• The search-based approach lets you target specific trends.
• It has a monitoring feature to track and collect information based on search terms.
• It's suitable for no-code market researchers.
• You can view sentiments directly.

👎 Cons

• It's not suitable for custom use cases.
• The results can be limited.

💲 Pricing

• Starts at around $10/month. Free trial available.

7. Webz.io

Webz.io provides data extraction low-code APIs for the different levels of the web, including the open, deep, and dark web. Its alternative social media solution is ideal for pentesters and security professionals looking to monitor and mitigate trending threats. Market researchers can also use it to monitor sentiments actively across various data sources. Its API aggregates data from multiple sources, including forums, review sites, and social signals such as likes, shares, and comments from Facebook, LinkedIn, and more.

👍 Pros

• It offers simple API endpoints for data aggregation from various platforms.
• It's a low-code platform suitable for developers and non-coders.
• You can get visual results or download the data as JSON.
• It returns sentiments based on aggregated data.

👎 Cons

• The data sources are mixed.
• Targeting social media requires manual sorting.

💲 Pricing

• Pricing is tailored towards requirements.

8. Heepsy

Heepsy is a suitable tool for influencer marketing. It's a social scraper for tracking influencers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Heepsy is a no-code tool with a mini search engine to locate an influencer's account on supported social platforms. The tool lets you communicate directly with influencers, including sending outreach emails, handling campaign offers and payments, and supplying resources. You can even create a list of influencers and automate individual tracking.

👍 Pros

• It's suitable for targeted influencer marketing.
• Heepsy lets you automate influencer communication seamlessly.
• You can automate multi-tracking from an influencer list.

👎 Cons

• Heepsy is strictly for influencer marketing.
• It limits you to an in-app dashboard.

💲 Pricing

• Starts at $89/month. Free plan with limited features available.

9. Outscraper

If you're looking for a no-code option to scrape several resources, Outscraper is the go-to tool. However, while it features many dedicated scraper APIs, the YouTube comment scraper is the only one that entirely falls within the social scope. To scrape a YouTube video comment, you only need to paste its URL or ID, and the tool will return its comments, which you can download as a CSV file. You can also scrape comments from multiple videos by uploading a CSV file containing video IDs.

👍 Pros

• It features several dedicated scraper APIs to collect data from various sources, including YouTube comments.
• You can download the scraped data as CSV.
• Its YouTube comment scraper allows multi-scraping from a CSV file.

👎 Cons

• It doesn't cover major social sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter(X).
• The strict no-code feature makes it less scalable than the low-code, code, or dual options.

💲 Pricing

• Pricing depends on the selected API. For instance, the YouTube Comment Scraper starts at $3/month, and a limited free tier is available.

Conclusion

We've taken you through the use cases of social media scraping and specific tools that can help you extract data from various social platforms. While some of these tools are no-code with advanced analytic features like sentiment analysis, those offering raw code-based APIs for data collection give more flexibility.

That said, manually scraping social media comes with technicalities that only specific anti-bot bypass tools can tackle. That's why we recommend an all-in-one option like ZenRows. This tool lets you scrape faster against all odds with zero technical setup requirements.

Try ZenRows for free!