How to scrape Threads

Threads app has become a game changer for social media in 2023, reaching an astonishing 100 million users in the first five days of launch. That’s as many people as the population of Egypt or Vietnam 🤯

And although growth in the number of Threads users is reported to be beginning to slow down, and despite the report of Instagram-like restrictions on freedom of speech, frustration over Twitter’s recent API policies could keep fueling Threads’ user acquisition.

For web scraping, because Instagram and Threads users share usernames across both platforms, scraping Threads is an untapped opportunity for sentiment analysis, research, and understanding customer behavior. It’s also the easiest example of doing comprehensive cross-platform social media scraping – since the profile names are the same.

So since social media scraping is one of the most common business cases for data extraction, we’ve prepared an early-bird tutorial for Threads. In this blog post, we'll show you how to use a web scraping tool to scrape Threads and get as much public data as the Threads rate limits will allow us. Let’s get on with it!

📲 What Threads data can I get using this scraper?

Here's the contact data you can get using Meta Threads Profile Scraper 🔗

🔍 How to scrape data from Threads app

Step 1. Choose Meta Threads Profile Scraper

Let's head over to Apify Store, our library of more than 1,000 ready-to-use tools able to get any data from the open web. Try searching for 'meta’ there, and you'll find the right tool. Use Meta Threads Profile Scraper 🔗. It is basically an unofficial version of Threads API which is free to try. Click the Try actor button.

If you don’t have your Apify account yet, all you need to sign up is your email address, Gmail, or GitHub account. And the best part is, you can try our Threads Scraper for free right away.

Step 2. Add Threads usernames

Head over to the Threads app and pick the profiles you want to scrape. Copy and paste each username into the scraper’s input. You can add as many profiles as you want using the + Add button, or upload a whole list at once using the Bulk edit button nearby.

Step 3. Click Start ▶ to begin scraping

Once you click the Start button, you'll see the output as the data begins to come in while our Threads scraper tool is operating, but it won't be done until the status changes to Succeeded. We've got our results in a total of just 20 seconds!

Step 4. Download Threads data

Once the data extraction is complete, you can view and download the extracted Threads data in Excel, JSON, CSV, and XML. You can now click the Storage tab -> Export button to download your data.

You can also clean and preprocess the scraped data before downloading it by removing any irrelevant information. Here, in our example, we only want username, full name, follower count, and some other details such as bio and URL in our dataset. In order to export only that data, we’ll choose the relevant tags from the list of Selected fields before downloading them.

Step 5. Bonus: export Threads data via API

If you don’t want to download the data but plug it directly into your app or project after extraction, you can use the Apify API option. Go over to Storage and click on the API button in the top-right corner. There you can explore multiple API export options, so choose Get output.

If you need to, you can also see all API Endpoints and API Client tokens in Apify Console.

❓FAQ

⚖️ Is it legal to scrape Threads data?

Since they all belong to the same company, when extracting data from Threads, the same rule applies to scraping Facebook or Instagram. The safest is to make sure that you are not extracting personal data (even if it’s publicly available for anyone on the web) or at least that you have a good reason to do that. For more information on the topic of ethical scraping, see the article from our lawyers.

🛡 Do you need proxies to scrape Threads?

You generally need proxies to have a successful and generally reliable scraping process nowadays. Social media websites often use blocking technologies to prevent scraping. We recommend using residential proxies as the most reliable way to go about scraping anything from Meta in 2023. Fortunately, our free plan offers a free trial of residential proxies, so you can fully test this scraper tool on getting data from Threads, Instagram or Facebook.

📹 Can I download Threads videos?

Yes, apart from the Meta Threads Profile Scraper that this tutorial is about, there are several other tools available for scraping Threads or similar content from different platforms. Here are a few examples:

These tools are just a few examples, and there may be other specialized Thread scrapers available in the future. We always recommend exploring the available options and choosing a tool that aligns with your scraping needs.

🎂 Can I scrape both Threads users and Instagram users?

Yes. You can scrape both Threads users and Instagram users since they share the same usernames and profiles. By using scraping techniques, you can extract data from both platforms simultaneously and get insights into user profiles and their activities on both Meta platforms. You may want to check out our Instagram Profile Scraper as well.

🤖 Can I use AI to scrape Threads?

AI is currently unable to scrape websites directly, but it can help generate code for scraping Threads if you prompt it with the target elements you want to scrape. Note that the code may not be functional, and website structure and design changes may impact the targeted elements and attributes.