A few months ago I just bypassed the scraping tool in JV, as something I didn’t really need to use or know how to use. Time passed and long story short, I found out the scraping tool is actually pretty great.
I tried to make a simple guide which will gather all the basic information in one place, instead of searching for it (like me) all around the MPSocial forum and Google. It’s simple, basic and fast so you won’t quit at the first step. It can happen that I let something out or even I missed something that I didn’t know about, so feel free to add your tips and tricks to this. But as said - this is for beginners, so I won’t talk about filtering your scraping results of 10k accounts, fine tuning of them and so on.
It is great for beginners, who don’t know their way around and haven’t used scraping yet.
A fast and basic JV scraping guide
Scraping in terms of Instagram is, very very generalized, taking informations out of a profile (or more of them) and feeding them to a tool in JV. Why is this great? Because you will tell your tool (follow, like, unfollow etc) to interact with exactly THIS post (so it shortens the time to search for relevant content in your sources like hashtags …) and it will cut your time to search for these things and interact with them.
There are two scraping options in JV:
a) Scrape tool - this tool is located in “Social Profiles” > your selected profile > “Scrape Tools”
This tool will help you extract comments and likes from a specific URL of a post, it can help you extract followers and/or followings of a specific username, or help you extract posts from a specific username and recently also IG TV videos. It will extract all of these into .csv format, so you can then filter these results, fine tune it and use it in your tools. Mostly used by users know already know what scraping is and know their way around it. Feel free to use it though to see how it works. You can also extract average likes, comments and most recent post date from specific users or check follow status of specific users.
b) Scrape and send to tool - this is the tool I will be talking about.
If I generalize the description of it - with this tool, you will extract posts or users depending on your source and send them to the “Like/follow specific posts/users” tool.
How is this helpful?
When you use a source in your tool, JV will use EB to search users or posts of the mentioned source in the browser. This takes time, takes the resources and can lead fast to action blocks (508 error). To cut down on the search time and resources, you feed the extracted (scraped) post or user to the above mentioned tool and say to it “Interact JUST with this” and nothing else. You make the whole process faster and honestly, it cuts down on the action blocks (at least from my side).
First step
It is strongly recommended to have an extra, scraping account. This account must use API (and not EB, so if you have a global option for EB, disable it as the scraping will not work), and it should be more or less used only for scraping. I think it’s obvious that you should have a proxy for this account. Set the account, proxy and set the settings (remember, start slowly if it’s a new account, don’t go overboard with it) and sources just like you would for your own account but with a small difference.
Second step
On the “Settings” screen of your tool, in your scraping account check the box that states “Send to extracted posts/users”. This makes the tool not to interact with the post/user (so it won’t follow the users or like the post) but it will extract the URL of it, and send it to “Extracted posts” tab, on the same page of the settings.
Third step
Open the “Extracted posts” tab. Here your extracted posts will start to gather. With this, you can send them to your main accounts on which you would like to interact with them. You can use the buttons to send them to specific accounts, split them to specific accounts or (if you check the option on the same tab) automatically send the scraped results to chosen accounts. If this is checked, results will be automatically sent to “Like specific posts based on URL” or “Follow specific users based on URL”.
Fourth step
On your main account, disable all sources except the ones mentioned above ("… specific … based on URL"). If you checked the option for automatic sending of scraped results, then the URL’s will start growing here. Be careful with the settings on the main account (start slowly, have longer pauses between operations) and start it. If everything goes well, you should see your interaction number growing.
TL:DR
- Have an extra account with a proxy, just designed to scrape posts and/or users.
- On that account, edit sources tab to fit your main account needs but check the “Send to extracted posts/users” option
- On the “Extracted posts” of the scrape account, choose to send the extracted URL’s to your main account used for interacting, or check the option to automatically send extracted items to the main account.
- On the main account check only the “Like/follow specific posts/users based on URL” and the URL’s from your scraping account should start showing.
- Start slowly, be careful with settings and just tip-toe around with it.
Honestly, this is the shortest and fastest I could go so it is still welcoming to beginners, but it serves as a nice guide to help you through. As said, this is the guide made on my own findings and experience and can vary from user to user. Try playing with settings (slowly and steady) and maybe you will be able to find a gold mine for yourself.