How to Scrape Instagram Usernames for Strategic Insights.

Join the magical journey to success! Imagine boosting your small music studio's prominence in town by employing TaskMagic's innovative approach. Discover the art of scraping and leveraging the information to unveil potential artists and customers in your local scene. Dive into our tutorial to see how we can scrape tons of usernames within seconds.

For this strategy to succeed, it is essential to have a Google Sheet set up, complete with at least one header in column A. In this case I have 3 just because I like to keep myself organized.

For this automation, all we need is the Google Sheet.

First, we are going to capture these steps.

Go to instagram.com and log into Instagram just like you normal would.

Click on “Turn on” or “Allow” on any pop up you see, I’ll show you how to fix them later.

Enter the URL of the page of your competitor, or the page you want to scrape the usernames of. In this case it’ll be https://instagram.com/estudio.fbl

Once we are in the URL of the profile, let’s click on “followers”.

When we have the list of followers, we can start to scrape the usernames, the profile link and even their names (we’re going to be using the names in a personalized message more information How to Automate Messages to Reach a New Audience. .)

So when we click on some “List” element. They sometimes come with a link, in this case it was with the users profile link. We want both so we can select text first, then we scrape the username again and then select URL to get both the username in text and URL form.

Once you’ve scraped the information you needed, you can stop the automation.

Once you finish recording, a pop-up will show up asking you if you want to send the scraped data to Webhook or to Google Sheet. In this case a google sheet if more than enough.

Next, we’ll get a “connect to Google Sheets” pop-up. We'll link it to the Google Sheet with at least one header. In this case we have 3. If all the information look correct. Click on “Looks good”

To connect with a Google Sheet URL, here's what you gotta do:

Go to your Google Sheet page and spot that share button at the top right corner.

In the pop-up, there's a link icon at the bottom left—click it to copy the link. Also, don't forget to share the automation with automations@taskmagic.com

Alright, once you've handled those steps, you can come back to TaskMagic. Take a quick peek at your sheet, and if everything's looking good, hit the "Looks good" button.

Once you’ve connected your sheets, we have to go edit the pop-ups. Go to all the first steps (I do step 1-7, in this case 7 is the last pop-up I get) and click on the 3 dots. That will take you to the edit step menu. In this menu you’ll see a “Allow error” checkbox, that will avoid the automation from failing in case the pop-up doesn't show up.

Because we went to a URL to scrape the Instagram page, we need to manually add this step in our workflow. Before the step where we clicked on the followers, we need to add this URL. In this case https://instagram.com/estudio.fbl. Click on the green + button and you’ll see a drop down.

From this dropdown, select URL.

Once you click on “URL”, you’ll see a pop-up, here you’ll input the URL.

That is all we have to edit from the steps. After we’ve done all that, we can now play the steps and get to scraping.

This might take a minute so let the app do its thing.

If you see a green message on the bottom left of your screen you can now go to your google sheet and you’ll see the username, profile link and user names in this sheet.

And you are now done! You can now scrape tons of usernames buy just doing the process once! If you want to see how we’re going to be using the names in a personalized message click on How to Automate Messages to Reach a New Audience. or see this video:

Streamlining the data collection process on Instagram has never been easier thanks to the power of automation. By following the steps outlined in this guide and leveraging tools like TaskMagic and Google Sheets, you can efficiently gather essential user information for your marketing endeavors. From identifying potential leads to analyzing your competitors, this two-step automation offers a practical solution to enhance your social media strategy. Embrace the future of data acquisition and make informed decisions that drive results. Start implementing these techniques today and unlock the true potential of your Instagram marketing efforts.