Are you looking to get more out of your Instagram account, study your competitors on the platform, or even “spy” your potential partners’ accounts? If yes, then buckle up and keep reading.
To increase your following and engagement, you first need to start by understanding how to scrape Instagram followers efficiently. Best part? You don’t even need to know a single line of code to start scraping.
In this article, we’ll show you how to scrape Instagram followers so you can get more out of your account and grow your follower base. You’re also going to learn a number of super useful no-code automations that will save you time, effort, and unnecessary headaches while scraping.
Let’s dive in!
How to scrape Instagram followers
Bardeen is a workflow automation Chrome extension. Bardeen is integrated with Instagram, providing ready-to-use Instagram scrapers that can be activated with a single click.
Using these scrapers, Bardeen can retrieve data from a webpage and export it in an organized format. To give you a better idea of this feature, let’s try out an automation. First, install Bardeen in your browser.
The first automation is perfect for growth hacking. It's going to extract following and followers of an individual Instagram profile page faster than you can say “Blueberry pie”.
Let’s imagine that you want to follow all of the people that Kanye West follows as well. When we run the automation, it’s going to ask how many profiles you want to extract. Let’s say you want to get 100 people from his following list and have them added to your Google Sheets. Just click on the Bardeen extension, open his following, and run the playbook. Boom! You just saved yourself about a couple of hours of mindless copy-pasting:
If you want to actually see the images of those profiles, here is a little hack:
You can write an image formula and point it to an image link. Drag it down to see the profile page images.
💪Pro-tip: You can also use the spreadsheet in combination with other tools to automatically follow all of these people or enrich IG profile data from a list of links in Google Sheets:
Scrape an Instagram profile and save it to your favorite app
Now let's take a look at two playbooks that are perfect for anybody who's doing influencer marketing. If you use Instagram to identify interesting people that you want to reach out to, these automations are exactly what you need.
You can save an IG profile in just one click to either Notion, ClickUp, Airtable, or depending on your productivity app preference.
💪Pro-tip: If you want to save an Instagram profile to a different productivity app, you can do so by customizing the Bardeen automation in the playbook builder. Check out this tutorial to learn how to edit pre-built playbooks.
Build your own website data Scraper template
If you want to get a little geeky and make your own custom web scraper template to extract information from Instagram or any other website, you can build a brand-new scraper with the Bardeen extension.
Here you have different options. You can scrape data on Active Tab (currently open tab or scrape information in the background. You can just feed the website data scraper your link and it's going to open the page in the background and extract the information you need.
Now, you need to choose a website data scraper template. You will have two options here:
- Single data scraper
- List data scraper
For our use case, we’re going to choose a single data scraper. Then pick a name for your template and save it.
The next step is to identify the fields you want to extract information from such as followers, following, description, or a link:
Now we need to add this information to an app. We can choose from a list of apps that Bardeen has in the library. Click on “Add new action” or “+” button next to the previous action:
For this example, let’s pick Google Sheets as our app and pick “Add rows to Google Sheets” as our action:
Pick your Google Sheet. Then you will need to point the data coming from the previous action into the second action:
It’s going to get the data from the scraper and add it to the spreadsheet. Click on “Done” and save your automation.
Now you’ve got yourself a custom playbook! Feel free to test it out immediately 🙂
For detailed instructions on how to build your own data scraper, read this tutorial.
Creating a right-click automation
To take it even further, let’s play around with the automation you just built and add in a right-click scraper action.
Open the playbook in the Playbook Builder with the scraper you just created in the example above and add a trigger action, called “When I Right-Click On A Website”:
Next, choose the name of your menu bar, for example, “IG to Sheets”:
Click on “Done”, close the Playbook Builder and you’re all set!
Important note: Make sure to turn the toggle on to enable this Autobook.
From here, when you right-click on the Instagram page, a new option is going to appear:
The information is now going to be added automatically to your Google Spreadsheet.
If you want to learn more about creating your own Autobooks, check out this tutorial.
In addition to this, you can also scrape data from other social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, and it’s just as simple as Instagram! Here are a few automations to scrape data from Instagram and Facebook. Explore all website data scrapers.
Endnotes
As you can see, scraping profiles on Instagram can be very easy and fun at the same time. It can help you boost your business, increase sales, grow your follower base, and more. However, we do need to mention that Instagram has a strict policy on scraping and you have to do it at your own risk.
You can also learn more about scraping data without code.
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