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Hintly, a one-stop-lead shop that strives to provide perfect-fit leads for the marketing industry, faced a challenge. Juliano Nassar, the Product Owner at hintly, needed to collect fresh data from social media to help find leads that fit the industry-specific criteria that hintly’s primary customers, marketing agencies, are interested in. To solve this problem, hintly turned to Apify's web scraping tools.
Finding the right web scraping solution
Juliano has a strong background in programming and data. He was looking for a good tool to get data from TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. He found Apify through Google and decided it was the best choice compared to other tools and their own scrapers.
I was looking for scraping data for TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. I found Apify through Google.
-- Juliano Nassar
Easy integration with Apify API
Hintly used Apify's scraping tools through the Apify API to get data from social media platforms. They used Apify to collect recent posts, usernames, and video counts per hashtag. They didn’t need old data, only the latest information. Juliano immediately liked how easy it was to set up Apify with their system.
We use the data that we scrape from social media to define our customer’s Ideal Customer Profile and identify the leads that fit the ICP.
-- Juliano Nassar
Making data collection simpler
Juliano’s team used Apify’s webhooks to get notified when scraping runs were done. They then fetched the data through the API and saved it in their MongoDB database for further use.
Other tools we tested charged us for time, and some of their tools were not that efficient. Apify is much faster and more cost-effective.
-- Juliano Nassar
Benefits of using Apify
- Efficiency and cost-effectiveness: Apify’s pricing and speed made it better than competitors like PhantomBuster.
- Easy integration: Apify’s API was simple to integrate, and they didn’t have to worry about session cookies.
- Relevant data focus: Hintly could get exactly the data they needed without any extra information.
Future plans to scrape multiple platforms
Juliano mentioned that they need to scrape advertisement data from TikTok and other social media platforms, and this is currently hard to find. He is also interested in Apify’s plans for bundled scrapers that can search multiple platforms at once.
It’s difficult to connect data from different sources, but we are getting there.
-- Juliano Nassar
Conclusion: How web scraping improved hintly's data collection
Using Apify, hintly improved its data collection process, making it easier to identify the leads that hintly’s customers are looking for. The integration was smooth, cost-effective, and provided the exact data they needed.
Thanks to Apify, we can focus on making data-driven decisions without worrying about the complexities of data scraping.
-- Juliano Nassar
As hintly continues to grow, Apify will help them get the data they need to keep giving great insights to marketing and sales teams.
