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X (Twitter) Web Scraping: Legality, Methods & Use Cases 2024

X (Twitter) Web Scraping: Legality, Methods & Use Cases 2024X (Twitter) Web Scraping: Legality, Methods & Use Cases 2024

Twitter has updated its brand identity, now going by “X”. It was among the most popular social media platforms in the world, with 436 million monthly active users in 2022 (see Figure 1).1 We don’t have a comparison of amount of text data across social media sites, but given that YouTube and Facebook support different content formats, Twitter may be the richest source of text data amongst all social media platforms.

In this research, we will dive into each aspect of collecting Twitter data for your business use cases. What do we mean by Twitter data? Should you use no-code Twitter web scraper or API solution for data extraction? What are the real life examples that companies used Twitter data for? Let’s get started with answers.

Figure 1: Top social media platforms in 2022

What is Twitter data?

When we think of Twitter, we can all imagine a feed full of tweets back to back, with numbers of likes and specific owners of the tweets. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are more details you can pull from Twitter that we will summarize in 3 levels:

  1. Keywords / hashtags: At the highest level, you can pull a certain number of tweets that contains a specific keyword or hashtag or combinations of them. You can curate your search by limiting the tweets to a certain number of likes or a date in order to narrow down your data to a particular event or power of influence.
  2. Tweets: One level down, you can pull all the tweets of specified profiles, again with ability to filter your data into certain tweets of these individuals such as tweets that contained a URL or tweets that got retweeted.
  3. Profiles: At the lowest level, you can collect all the information about a Twitter user’s public account. Anything you see on their page, such as their bio, number of followers or tweets would be reported on a structured format along with the profile owner.

Sponsored: Check out how three levels of Twitter data would look Bright Data’s Twitter data collector from samples.

Figure 2. shows output of Billie Eilish’s publicly available profile scraped from Twitter.

Figure 2. shows output of Billie Eilish's publicly available profile scraped from Twitter, including profile name, posts, bia, followers and following.
Figure 2: Output of Billie Eilish’s publicly available profile data scraped from Twitter. Source: Bright Data

Top X (Twitter) Scraping Tools

VendorsSpecial Features Pricing (Starts From)Free trial
Bright DataLarge project support
Global network of proxies
$5007-day
SmartproxyNo-code Scraper
Proxy services
$50 14-day money-back
NimbleResidential & Unlocking proxy$6007-day
NetNutRotating residential proxiesCustom offer7-day
PhantombusterIntegrations with Zapier, Slack, Trello$5614-day
OctoparseCloud-based scraping AP$7514-day
ScrapingBee Extraction tool with CSS selectors$497-day

For an in-depth analysis and review of the leading X (Twitter) web scraping tools, read our comprehensive study on this subject.

It is legal and allowed to scrape publicly available data from Twitter. It means anything that you can see without logging into the website. For example, if a user’s profile is private, even if you personally follow this person and can access their profile, you can not scrape, share or use this data for any purposes. That being said, being scraped in general is not desired by websites like Twitter, because it brings excess traffic on their website. Therefore, they try to block automated web scrapers.

To learn how to circumvent anti-scraping obstacles for efficient data extraction, check out top 7 web scraping best practices in 2023.

Is web scraping better than Twitter API?

Twitter provides free API access for write-only use cases.2 You need to register your use case at Twitter Developer website and they will share your API key in a few days if your use case is confirmed.

For getting tweet data, paid API access is necessary. The biggest advantage of API is that, since it is supported by Twitter, there is no risk of being blocked as long as you pull the data by following their API guidelines. However, API has certain limitations in terms of how back in the past you can pull data and how many tweets you can pull in a minute. These rules can change year by year and should be double checked directly from Twitter’s most up to date guidelines.

Read our guide on web scraping APIs to explore the top web scraping APIs and the capabilities they enable including, third-party APIs such as Instagram, Twitter and Amazon.

Web scraping allows you to collect any data as long as it is still available on the website. Moreover, according to a research, web scraping is more time efficient than API. We encourage you to read our article about top 7 differences between API and web scraping, which has a specific section for Twitter data, to determine which use case fits your solution better.

Two Methods to Scrape Twitter Data

There are two methods you can scrape the Twitter data with. You can either build a scraper in-house or outsource this effort to a professional tool. Best choice depends on your particular business need.

Building a web scraper in-house has its own challenges mostly related to cost and maintenance. For example, if you intend to scrape well-protected websites or extract data on a large scale, you should take precautions such as integrating a proxy server solution into your scraping bot to avoid IP blocking.

Read Top 10 Proxy Service Providers of 2023 for Web Scraping to better understand the proxy service provider landscape.

On the other hand, if your web scraping needs will scale over time, building an in-house tool may be less costly than paying an external tool, which could increase based on the volume of data you need.

Recommendation:

Our recommendation is to start off with small volumes of data, either through free trials or a low tier of external web scraping services to test the ROI of your Twitter use case, and determine your long-term solution based on how much value Twitter data brings to your business.

1. Automated Twitter data collectors:

Another way to scrape Twitter data is to use an external tool to specify your data need, granularity and frequency. No-code Twitter scrapers can provide you data in raw format if you need to build a data science model based on that or also in a very structured spreadsheet if you don’t want to waste time on data processing and use it directly for analysis. If you choose working with a cloud web scraper, you also don’t need to store the large volumes of data in your databases.

Sponsored:

Bright Data is a cloud web scraping company that offers an automated web collector for Twitter.

Source: Bright Data

2. In-house scraper with Twitter packages:

A web scraper can be developed in any preferred programming language and can be modified for any website. Therefore, the best method to build an in-house web scraper is to use the language that you or your tech team feel the most confident about.

If you are looking for a more tailored programming package for Twitter web scraping, there are many publicly available Twitter repositories and packages that allow Twitter web scraping in different languages. For example, Tweepy in Python has 8.5k stars on Github and also a public community on Discord for support and troubleshooting.

Top 3 Business Use Cases of Twitter Data

We collected the most up to date business use cases in 2023 directly from Twitter’s website with real life examples. However, there are more web scraping use cases that you can get inspiration from other web data, such as Instagram, LinkedIn or other social media sites, and transform them for your business using Twitter data.

1. Brand Monitoring

Brands need to monitor their online presence in case of a copyright violation, fraud or misinformation about them which may harm their reputation. Monitoring the mentions about your brand as a keyword and also relevant hashtags on Twitter will help you detect and take action for such cases before they are spread. To learn more statistics and methods about brand protection, read our article on web scrapers & proxies to protect your brand.

For an example case, read how Brandwatch used Twitter data for monitoring keywords on Twitter for building a live feed into their crisis management process.

2. Financial Insights

Twitter is not only a place to track a specific keyword, but also find out what is trending. Financial institutions invest in collecting web data more over the years as a valuable source of insights to detect emerging startups, fluctations in market and political climate in different regions.

Insights that can redirect venture capitals and investment banks also come from news and search engine data, but social media is an organic way to keep track of how people’s opinions change about a certain financial trend, such as investment in a cryptocoin or follow key figures’ decisions which can influence a certain industry and market, such as political leaders’ decisions about economy.

For an example case, read how Likefolio integrated Twitter data into their financial investment decision making process.

3. Consumer research

Marketing Science Institute defined web scraping as the gold field of consumer research. This is because social media data enables companies to build a data source for voice of customer and social listening studies which constantly gets updated.

For an example case, read how Audiense used Twitter data for social listening and personalization engagement. One thing to keep in mind when using any social media site for consumer research is who their audience is. For example, in 2021, majority of Twitter’s worldwide users were below 35 years old, which may not be the target audience for some businesses.

More on social media scraping

To explore web scraping use cases for different industries, its benefits and challenges read our articles:

For guidance to choose the right tool, check out data-driven list of web scrapers, and reach out to us:

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Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
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Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst

Cem has been the principal analyst at AIMultiple since 2017. AIMultiple informs hundreds of thousands of businesses (as per similarWeb) including 60% of Fortune 500 every month.

Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and media that referenced AIMultiple.

Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised businesses on their enterprise software, automation, cloud, AI / ML and other technology related decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.

He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.

Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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1 Comments
Jones
Sep 20, 2023 at 12:10

You cannot access tweets for free using the API. Twitter (X) charges developers at minimum $100/month to use the API to access tweets. The free developer option is limited to posting only, which is not what you’d want to scrape Twitter for anyway.

Cem Dilmegani
Nov 01, 2023 at 17:31

Indeed, we updated that section, thank you for the heads up!

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