Social media and TikTok are a treasure trove of valuable data and marketing opportunities for any savvy digital marketer. With the right marketing strategy or growth hack you can build a pipeline of hot leads for your business that could take you to the next level.
However, one of the most difficult pieces of the puzzle is finding a reliable and cost effective proxy provider that allows you to scrape social media and TikTok, or which allows you to login and automate user interactions.
In this guide, we are going to break down the 7 best social media and TikTok proxy providers sharing with you their individual pros, cons and what tasks use cases suits them best.
Proxy Solutions for Web Scraping 1: ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI is a proxy solution designed to make scraping public data from the web as easy as possible. Simply configure your crawlers to send their requests to ScraperAPI and you are guaranteed to reliably get the data you need from TikTok and other social media platforms at a fraction of the cost of the other proxy solutions on this list.
Making ScraperAPI the perfect proxy solution for companies looking to extract large amounts of data from social media and TikTok profiles and topics. Simply send the URL of the page of the page you want to scrape to the API and it will return the HTML response with all the data you need ready to parse.
Better yet, ScraperAPI is by far the most cost effective solution on this list. Using their free plan (sign up here) you can scrape up to 1,000 social media or TikTok profiles every month completely for free. And with plans starting at just $49 per month for 250,000 requests and increasing to Enterprise Plans with 100M requests, there is a plan to meet any scraping requirement and budget.
If you’d like to give ScraperAPI a try then sign up to their 7-day trial here with 5,000 free requests, or if you need more than 3M requests per month then you can contact our sales team.
Pros: Simple to use proxy API that takes the hassle out of scraping websites at scale. Great reliability and functionality at a great price.
Cons: Not suited to scrape profile data from social media or TikTok as it doesn’t support scraping behind the login.
Proxy Solutions for Web Scraping 2: SmartProxy
Next on our list is SmartProxy, a top notch provider of residential proxies that you can use for scraping public social media or TikTok data or to use with your favorite automation tools.
With proxies available from 195 locations, SmartProxy is ideal if you need to match your accounts location with an IP address from the same geographic location when using automation tools for social media.
Working with all major social media tools and bots like Jarvee, DominatorHouse, Follow Liker, Gramista and many more SmartProxy is one of the best options for growth hackers and marketing automation.
However, with plans starting at $75 (plus VAT) per month for 5GB of bandwidth they can be a bit pricey. Especially, for those of you who have numerous automated accounts.
Pros: High quality social media proxies that work great with automation tools and bots, dedicated datacenter proxies from the US, code integrations in 6 programming languages.
Cons: Expensive to use for large scale web scraping or automation of hundreds/thousands of accounts.
Proxy Solutions for Web Scraping 3: Luminati
As the biggest and most well known proxy provider on the market, no proxy list is complete without mentioning Luminati. However, in this case Luminati probably is not the best suited proxy solution for social media scraping and automation.
Whilst they allow you to scrape public data with their proxies, you are not allowed to use their residential IPs for logging into social media and using automation tools and bots. Making them only viable for scraping public social media data.
However, using Luminati residential proxies for scraping social media can get expensive very fast. As an example, to monitor 100,000 social media profiles per day it would cost you about $6,000 per month with Luminati but only $249 per month with ScraperAPI.
Pros: High quality residential proxies with a lot of great features and geotargeting capabilities.
Cons: Very expensive for scraping social media, and you can’t use them with automation tools and bots.
Proxy Solutions for Web Scraping 4: OxyLabs
Another big player in the residential proxy market and a great option for social media proxies is OxyLabs.
Like Luminati and SmartProxy, OxyLabs offers a wide range of data center and residential proxies from over 40 different countries from around the world. Making them a great option for scraping and automating social media.
Although not as open as SmartProxy to using their proxies for social media automation, it is possible to use OxyLabs residential IPs with automation tools and bots.
But like SmartProxy and Luminati, their proxies aren’t cheap and require a big budget if you need to scrape large amounts of profile data every month or you need to manage thousands of automated social media accounts.
Pros: Good residential proxies with great geotargeting capabilities.
Cons: Very expensive when scraping at scale.
Proxy Solutions for Web Scraping 5: HighProxies
Offering cheap social media proxies, HighProxies is a great option for those who want proxies for social media but who are on a tight budget.
Although not as high quality or as reliable as services such as ScraperAPI or SmartProxy, High Proxies offer low cost social media proxies that are great for anyone just getting started in social media scraping or marketing automation.
Their customer support isn’t the best and you will have more reliability issues but with plans starting at $3 per month they are a great starting point.
Pros: Very low cost social media proxies.
Cons: Not very reliable and not suitable for scraping social media sites at scale.
Proxy Solutions for Web Scraping 6: ProxySeller
If you want cheap and cheerful, then look no further than ProxySeller. Although not the best quality proxy provider on the list, ProxySeller is great for those on a very tight budget.
Starting at only $0.93, you can get a social media proxy for a week that offers up 100Mbit/s, unlimited traffic and Http/Https/Socks5 enabled. Making it a great option for social media automation tools and bots.
However, like HighProxies, as the quality of their proxies isn’t the best you will have higher failure rates compared to other providers on this list and due to their smaller pool sizes they aren’t suitable for scraping large amounts of profile data from social media platforms.
Pros: Cheap proxies and plans for all use cases.
Cons: Proxies aren’t very reliable and have limited support.
Proxy Solutions for Web Scraping 7: Special Mention: PhantomBuster.io
Although not a proxy solution, PhantomBuster.io is a great option for those of you who want an easy to use social media scraping and automation tool.
Unlike other tools out there, PhantomBuster.io removes the need for you to build your own social media scrapers and find your own proxies. They have a huge variety of pre-built web scraping and marketing automation tools for all the major social media platforms that will give your growth marketing the edge over your competitors.
