I am developing web project, there users can add their instagram/facebook accounts. After they add their account I need to pull profile data(posts, like counts etc). which method is good to do that. Scraping or instagram/facebook API integration?
I am using python for the project
Question posted in Facebook API
The official documentation for the Facebook APIs can be found here.
2
Answers
Certainly scraping will work in the beginning, might get you blocked for bott-ing though. Also I believe it’s probably against the guidelines.
I’ve used Selenium w. Python before to scrape data ( also from Instagram ). To get this to work properly I’ve randomized most of the actions so it’s harder to be detected as a bot.
Also for scraping specific fields I found XPath’s to be quite useful.
Facebook and Instagram load a lot of it’s content dynamically (e.g.: when you scroll) so do keep in mind that you have to implement these ‘human’-actions to scrape effectively.
Certainly Facebook and Instagram API are the straight forward approaches 🙂
You should use social authentication of Python. Based on the web framework you are using, packages would be available.