April 2024

In this current digital era, it is so easy to contribute to the growing volume of data: with just a few clicks or taps, we regularly post to a plethora of available social media channels. To put this enormous volume of big data into perspective: users contribute between 100 and 200 million posts to X, daily. When it comes to working with these large data sets often featuring valuable, organic user opinions for example, it is essential to identify an efficient methodological approach.

This became apparent in one of our current client projects which requires a routine monitoring of organic user opinions on a specified topic published to X. This has previously meant performing manual keyword searches on X and scrolling through the endless search results, all whilst simultaneously identifying valuable content. In a bid to make this process more efficient and better optimise our internal processes, we at Content5 have begun using the web scraping software solution, Octoparse.

Implementing the web scraping tool Octoparse

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from webpages and web scrapers like Octoparse function as an automated and customisable data collector. Essentially, the process is comprised of human behaviours such as the individual tasks of searching, scrolling, clicking, copying, and subsequently pasting relevant material. 

With Octoparse we are able to collect all the open-source data from X in one go: the tool performs the mentioned manual tasks for all posts that contain a specified keyword. In the next step, we download a complete data set from the software in a Microsoft Excel file. This enables us to focus on identifying and evaluating all thematically relevant posts, because the data is presented in a clear, structured layout.

Because our implementation of this tool has had a positive impact on our overall efficiency and precision in the described project, we are keen to trial and implement Octoparse for more projects.