RPA Use Case: Facebook Data Scraping

We take you through an example of how RPA can be used in social media data scraping workflows for faster, more accurate information retrieval.

Bloom Automation

Problem

Business teams and marketers keep a close eye on social media activity to monitor their brand via posts and comments from the public. They retrieve information including number of posts; frequent times of activity; user-generated content; and demographic information like location, age, and job title. This data can be used to better understand your audience for business gains or for sentiment analysis. While there is value in this information, the process of recouping it is tedious and boring. In order for it to be worthwhile, business teams and marketers need to speed up the process. Let’s see an example of how a software robot can be utilized here and can save time and efforts for the business.

Solution

Data scraping is the perfect candidate for robotic process automation because it is repetitive and rule-based. A software bot can be programmed to crawl social media pages or groups for several different types of data. The bot automatically saves the information in an Excel sheet for your business or marketing purposes. Let’s look at an example using UiPath Studio and Facebook.

Here’s how it works: Once the bot is triggered, it will automatically crate a folder with the run date. Next, it will open the Facebook application and navigate to the group you want to investigate. The bot will then scrape all post data from the last 24 hours. Once completed, the data from the group will be copied into a spreadsheet inside the folder. This process will be repeated for all groups assigned in the process.

rpa use case facebook data scraping problem statement (1)

Impact

Implementing RPA for data scraping can have a positive and wide-spread impact on the process. Replacing humans with robots to sift through Facebook groups to check for new activity and record it will significantly speed up the process. Not only that, software bots are 100% accurate if programmed correctly, so they won’t get distracted or lose their train of thought during the boring task. This will increase the accuracy of the data scraping process. In turn, businesses will gain a better understanding of how social media users behave online and adjust their marketing strategies accordingly. Implementing RPA into this process will also free up business users and marketers to complete more creative and valuable jobs like customers service or content creations.

rpa use case facebook data scraping problem statement (1)

Conclusion

Data scraping is a popular task carried out by many business users and marketers for things like demographic studies and sentiment analysis. But the manual process is riddled with errors and very laborious. Social media is becoming more and more prominent, so organizations would be wise to expedite this process. Software bots can be programmed to open applications and crawl groups for activity. This can be applied to Facebook business pages, or any other social media feed where user data needs to be collected.

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