While web scraping has been on the rise for many years. Its uses and applications have grown with time. This can be attributed to multiple factors such as – more reliable web scraping solutions, the rise of big data analytics, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis, the use of alternate data sources, and more. More and more data sources have been added to the long list of websites that are being scraped daily for updated data. With these, alternate data sources have found a strong footing. Thanks to the large data generated from social media websites and review platforms, one of the many uses for scraping social media websites is for a brand audit.
What is Social Media Scraping?
Social media are interactive digitally-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.
Social media scraping involves automating the process of extracting data from social media websites such as Twitter and Instagram through web scraping. The scraped social media data allows businesses to gain useful insight into brand and consumer sentiment.
The Importance of Brand Audit
Almost every brand today is on social media, offering its products and services, and creating that special connection with their target audience. Brands are becoming synonymous with the products.
For example, most people go to a shop and ask for a “Coca-Cola”, and not a soft drink. Being able to reach this level of public recognition is difficult unless you monitor your digital presence regularly and make sure that the public’s perception of your company is positive. Organic growth and capturing the share of mind and heart is the ultimate objective of almost every company and brand. And even if you do invest tons in paid marketing campaigns. Unless you listen to your customers, there is a limit to what you can achieve.
Getting an idea of what your customers think of your products, services, the complaints that they have, the issues that they face, whether there are lines of communication between the company and the customer, and how they would rate you as a brand, etc. These are important pieces of information that will help redraw your business plan.
All this information and more can be scraped from online sources and can be used together to ascertain the pain points as well as the points where you shine. Through a brand audit, you can bring about data-driven changes that will in turn bring in more customers. Often these changes may be procedural and not cost you any money.
The Data Sources to Scraping Social Media Websites
The brand audit requires various data sources, almost all of which are external:
- Reviews of products on eCommerce websites
- Reviews of products or services on your website
- Comments made by users on review websites
- Comments made by users on social media websites can be mentions or comments on your social media page
- News media articles with the mention of your brand, or its executives
There are too many websites in the categories mentioned above, and on top of that, there can be more websites where your brand name finds mention. Trying to scrape data from all these sources may be difficult. It is recommended to start small.
Find the social media websites where your brand faces the most mentions and scrape data from them.
Wherever your products or services are listed be it on a platform like Amazon or your website, there are bound to be reviews and ratings scrape them. Once you begin with these, you can then set up an auto-crawler that will check for mentions using a search engine like Google and scrape the related text. These scraped blobs of data will then need to be further analyzed often manually to come up with new websites that you need to add to your list.
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