It is very rare for brands to use traditional marketing to reach their customers. Digital media marketing through ads took up a great chunk of the advertisements from television, but people use ad blockers to conduct uninterrupted online surfing. As a result, brands have resorted to influencer marketing that heavily relies on web scraping social media platforms.
Social media networks continually update their algorithm to protect public users’ information. An effective way to hide user identity for web scraping is using residential proxies. These online tools are pretty accurate at protecting users’ IP addresses, making them appear as if they were connected from a specific geographic location to social media algorithms. Let’s see how brands use proxies to employ influencer marketing to grow their business.
Need for Scraping Social Media Networks
Brands are always coming up with unique ways to market their product. At one point, businesses were using digital marketing to advertise their products, but tools like ad blockers made this strategy very limited. On the contrary, an influencer marketing strategy is very effective because it allows brands to target the right audience through a word-of-mouth approach. The nature of influencers depends on the type of market strategy that brands are devising. Hence brands choose influencers to:
- Increase their reach.
- Use a particular style of advertisement.
Brands use web scraping software to access large volumes of data from different platforms. The following types of information can help brands collect data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube to choose a suitable influencer.
- Followers
- Subscription
- Comments
- Biography
- Websites
- Posts
Obtaining public information in large volumes is a resource-intensive task and requires robust tools. Business entities utilize various web scraping software like Octoparse to conduct crawling from social media platforms. Web crawling software automates data extraction processes and helps parse data from larger junks. While using such software, marketers or analysts assign specific tags and follow certain steps through different web scraping software. Brands use this automated information to find influencers to increase their customer reach or target a specific style. However, social media platforms flag recurring IP addresses and block their access. Hence, agencies can use proxies to hide their IP addresses and do uninterrupted scraping for marketing purposes.
How Proxies Can Help
Proxies are online tools that business entities can use to stay anonymous and access public information without the fear of getting banned. Proxies mask the IP address and allow users to trick algorithms that constantly look out for recurrent visitors on social media. In the case of data center proxies, users employ shared IP addresses and are connected to public servers. These proxies come with a high-speed network and allow users to crawl through greater volumes of data at higher speeds. They are comparatively safe to use, considerably cheap in price, less effective at keeping users anonymous, and prone to getting blocked by social media network security protocols. However, there are other types of proxies that connect users with private proxy servers and are more reliable for web scraping purposes.
Residential proxies and their benefits
This is a type of intermediate proxy that works with IP addresses generated by Internet service providers. Such IP addresses are registered in Public databases, unlike shared proxies. They are linked to actual electronic devices and online services identify them as real people with precise locations. The proxy also hides the user identity behind a pool of IPs, hence referred to as a proxy with rotating IPs or back-connect proxies. It has the capacity to target a location with more than 40 million IP addresses. You can get an extension of this proxy for all commonly used browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.
This proxy network is quite effective at hiding user identities with fewer chances of getting flagged and blocked by websites, thus keeping users completely anonymous. Many providers are offering residential proxies at reasonable prices and Smartproxy is among the best. Marketers can use such proxies to run web scraping software without any hindrances.
For security purposes, social media networks are constantly updating their algorithms. The use of proxies allows web scrapers to hide their IP addresses and obtain data about potential influencers on social media platforms. This risk-free mode of collecting information helps marketers identify suitable influencers from their audience on social media networks. From this information, posts with low performance can be detected and corrective measures can be effectively implemented to increase the influencer’s reach on the audience.
Conclusion
Increasing brand reach through influencer marketing is the new norm in the marketing culture. Influencers on social media have huge followings with greater reach. Marketing agencies use this attribute for their benefit and find the right people who can help them target an audience they cannot reach through other ways. Furthermore, proxies make this process more secure and allow brands to grow their business in highly competitive online markets.
