How to Scrape Twitter Data Using a Residential Proxy Network

The point of scraping Twitter

Scraping is an automated process of gathering publicly accessible data in bulk. When scraping, you use an automated solution to extract information from a website of your choice.

In the case of Twitter, the data worthy of scraping could be tweets, profiles, followers and following lists, images, likes, hashtags, search results, URLs, emails, etc. Businesses use Twitter data for purposes such as:

• Brand monitoring – follow various channels, tweets, and threads where people talk about your brand.
• Sentiment analysis – gather all the reviews and comments regarding your brand to understand the user experience.
• Competitor monitoring – keep track of your competitors’ moves to adapt accordingly.
• Influencer research – find influential people in your field to collaborate with.
• Market awareness – monitor the ups and downs of global and local markets.
• Sociological research – take the temperature of what people think, feel, and how they are likely to behave.

By scraping Twitter, you can gather relevant data, save up a collection of it, and create a comprehensive study of the stats. If you’re new to scraping, it can be a relatively easy and surprisingly helpful stepping stone toward scaling your business.

Is it legal to scrape Twitter?

When it comes to the legality of scraping something, we first have to consider whether the data is available publicly. If so, you can next check the website’s Terms of Service and the robots.txt file. Hopefully, there isn’t anything forbidding scraping.

Speaking of Twitter specifically, it’s difficult to say for certain if you’re in the clear to scrape it. Legality depends on how you’re going to use the extracted information. The risk appears to be low, however, since people have been scraping Twitter left, right, and center without trouble for quite a while. Even with that in mind, better be safe than sorry, and get legal consultation.

The easy ways to scrape Twitter

Twitter offers the official public Twitter APIs. You can certainly use them to access core elements of the platform: tweets, direct messages, spaces, lists, users, and so on. But the downside is that most of these APIs are limited, slow, and not designed for large-scale tasks, while others are hard to get access to.

On the other hand, you can build a scraper yourself or pick from a bunch of scraping solutions out there. If you still haven’t found the one for your needs, try our Web Scraping API. It’s an advanced solution that combines 40M+ datacenter and residential proxies. Our web scraping tool lets you bypass geo-restrictions, allows city-level targeting, and is highly flexible while fetching the complete HTML code of your target site. On top of that, it ensures a 100% success rate every time!

Another possibility is using our No-Code Scraper. With the No-Code Scraper extension on Chrome, you can freely scrape any website you’re browsing. Simply click on a few elements you wish to collect and the tool will automatically gather all the similar elements on that website. It’s the coolest and breeziest solution for idea validation – cheap, fast, and requires minimal effort.

Scraping Twitter data with residential proxies

Residential proxies are the best kind of proxy when scraping Twitter. They provide the user with a residential IP address from a real mobile or computer device. Here are a few reasons why they are necessary when scraping Twitter: 

• residential proxies guarantee you safety and anonymity from third parties;
• ensure your scraping tool goes undetected;
• allow you to send many requests without getting your IP blocked by the target website.

Usually, if Twitter sees a bot coming their way, they will try to stop it by banning the IP address or feeding you fake, useless information. With residential proxies, however, you won’t have to worry. They are excellent for scraping websites extra sensitive to automated activity. 

Residential proxies are the most suitable for accessing public data and avoiding any blocking. So add to your proxies a professional scraping tool, and you’ll happily scrape Twitter without a problem.

Aside from scraping, you can use residential proxies for various other tasks. Namely, for SEO monitoring, bot automation, market price monitoring, ad verification, bypassing geo-restrictions, operating stealth accounts, and so on.

Deciding on a proxy service

Free proxy options may seem attractive, but it’s a disaster waiting to happen. By using a free proxy service, you are likely to have your data exposed as the provider might harvest and leak it.

Besides, these free proxies are slow, ineffective, and easily detected by the targeted websites.

Meanwhile, a proxy worth its name is rapid, anonymous, and secure. You can get such proxies with an impeccable success rate from a proxy provider like Smartproxy. And one serious perk you get with us is our eager-to-help customer support squad that’s available round-the-clock!

In closing

Don’t brush off Twitter as a place for people to endlessly argue with each other. It’s a fantastic, resource-rich website with data that could be useful to you.

We can’t overstate the importance of residential proxies for the success of your scraping projects. And you don’t have to look far to get what you need! Smartproxy has an enormous residential proxy pool with more than 40 million IPs from over 195 locations worldwide.

If we’ve piqued your interest, check out our residential proxy pricing page to get started!