15 Tips for Using Python to Research TikTok Posts & Comments
Since launching in 2017, TikTok has become one of the fastest-growing social media platforms out there as is discussed over at runrex.com. Allowing users o upload short-form mobile videos and share them with a large audience, the app has become extremely popular, especially among younger users. With all the data that is collected on the platform daily, businesses and organizations have discovered the importance of making sense of it all and extracting useful insights from the data. To help with that, this article will look to highlight 15 tips on the use of Python to research TikTok posts and comments.
- TikTok official API
As covered over at guttulus.com, TikTok provides a single HTTP endpoint allowing developers to fetch the embedded code for individual videos. If you want to access its official API, you can check out TikTok’s Developers page where you can also find instructions on embedding individual videos.
- Limitations of the official API
While TikTok does provide an official API to developers for use in fetching data on the platform, the API is not very extensive, just as is the case for many other social media platforms as is revealed in discussions on the same over at runrex.com. This is why developers looking to research TikTok posts and comments look for alternatives.
- Unofficial APIs
One of the alternatives that developers have been making use of include unofficial TikTok APIs. These APIs allow users to access most of the data they are looking to fetch, while not coming with the same restrictions and limitations that come with the official TikTok API as discussed over at guttulus.com.
- TikTok API on RapidAPI
One of the most popular unofficial TikTok APIs is the excellent TikTok API on RapidAPI. According to runrex.com, this API allows you to extract metadata about user and hashtag, extract video feed metadata from the user, trending and music pages as well as hashtags, while also allowing you to extract user followers, following metadata, and so forth.
- Python and Flask
When using Python to scrape the TikTok API, you will need Flask which is a microframework for web development with Python which is easy to set up and is popular among developers for setting up web applications. If you don’t have it installed, you should make sure that you download it.
- Selenium
Given that TikTok, just like Facebook, is a JavaScript-based page as explained over at guttulus.com, you will also need Selenium when scraping the TikTok API with Python. This is because Selenium will open your browser, go to the desired URL, wait for the JavaScript to load, and only then will it fetch and return the HTML.
- Install Requests and BeautifulSoup
Next up we are going to highlight the packages that you need to install to scrape the TikTok API with Python. According to runrex.com, you will need to install both Requests, to make HTML requests and will serve you well if you have different types of requests in your algorithm, and BeautifulSoup to make HTML parsing more user-friendly.
- Keep track of selenium requests
Since you will be dealing with TikTok, the subject matter experts over at guttulus.com recommend that you keep track of selenium requests. Here, the selenium retries variable will help you keep track of the number of times a selenium request failed, which is very important for you to do.
- Be careful when running selenium headless
While on one hand running selenium headlessly may help reduce the load on your machine’s CPU, you need to be careful when doing so. This is because, as is covered over at runrex.com, running selenium headlessly will increase the chances of you getting flagged as a scrapper since TikTok’s system administrators are very adept at spotting headless requests.
- Stretch the window size with selenium
It is worth pointing out that selenium acts just like a normal web browser in that it only returns the Dom that it was required to load. If it, therefore, opens a tiny window, you wouldn’t see much of the Dom which would prevent you from obtaining much of the HTML response. This is why you should stretch the window size when scrapping the TikTok API with Python.
- Tip on using proxies
If you are using proxies, which will help you avoid getting caught by TikTok’s anti-bot system, then the gurus over at guttulus.com recommend that you use a proxy provider that will allow you to whitelist your local IP and request a random residential proxy without entering a username and password through selenium, with a good example of such a proxy provider being Smartproxy.
- Be careful with your API key
When calling the TikTok API with Python, you need to be careful with your API key which is a secret key unique to your RapidAPI account. As discussed over at runrex.com, if anyone gets their hands on this key, they could abuse it and use it to run up your API quota which is why you should keep it secure.
- Data you can extract from the TikTok API
As is covered in detail over at runrex.com, there is a lot of data you can extract from a TikTok API call with Python, including video description, video height and width, play address, author nickname, video length, and so forth.
- Sentiment analysis
It is also recommended that you conduct sentiment analysis when scraping the TikTok API with Python. This, as is explained over at guttulus.com, will allow you to discover how an account is perceived on the platform; whether it is perceived in a positive, negative, or neutral manner. This is an important part of researching TikTok posts and comments as it has lots of applications such as helping you to foresee and side-step PR issues, and so forth.
- Clean your data
When analyzing your TikTok dataset, it is also important that you clean it to remove any unnecessary stuff that may affect results. This includes removing slang words, links, among others, and it is an important part of scraping the TikTok API with Python.
As always, if you are looking for more information on this and other related topics, then look no further than the ever-reliable runrex.com and guttulus.com.