How to do this Growth Hack and what can it do for you?
It's a really super simple and super powerful growth hack.
What results should you expect from this Growth hack?
- Growth Hack Type: Scraping Instagram using chrome extension
- Expected results: Obtaining emails from prospects on Instagram
Why use this Growth Hack?
For this Growth Hack, we are going to use Google Dorks and chome extensions: ONLY.
In short, you will start a search, have a coffee and come back to your computer with lots of emails collected automatically.
If you don't know what Google Dorks are, I invite you to consult one of my articles:
READ MORE: How do I find leads for free with Google? (Google Docks)
Use this Growth Hacks to multiply the points of contact with your prospects.
How do you do this Growth Hack?
Find emails from Google
I already talked about Google dorks on my site, but for this Growth Hack, the search will be quite simple:
@gmail.com OR @yahoo.com OR @ymail.com OR @live.com OR @hotmail.com OR @outlook.com OR @aol.com OR @zoho.com OR @mail.com OR @icloud.com site:instagram.com
When I ran the test above, Google found 14 million emails (Gmail account or others).
At that level, we just realized that it was possible through Google to find emails on Instagram.
Now we are going to modify the Google Dork to make the search results stick to our niche.
For this example, we are going to target the niche of pets and more particularly that of cats.
Using the same string, let's just add “cat food” as below:
cat food @gmail .com OR @yahoo .com OR @ymail .com OR .com OR @live .com OR .com OR @hotmail .com OR @outlook @aol .com OR vis.com OR ur.com OR .com OR .com any site: instagram.com @zoho @mail @icloud
In less than a second, I found nearly 2,000 emails from Instagram profiles that have emails and that are in the niche I just targeted.
Extracting emails from search results
The technique is to use 3 chrome extensions divided as follows:
1/ An extension that detects emails in search results pages: EmailExtractor
2/ An extension that removes pagination to obtain an “infinite” page with all the results: AutoPageRize
3/ An extension that will automatically scroll the “infinite” page: Simple Autoscroll
The joint work of these extensions will allow you to launch a search and see your browser automatically scroll and detect all emails without effort on your part.
Reminder of the procedure:
- Start a search with your Google Dorks
- Press the Simple Autoscroll extension to see the page automatically scroll
- Wait for the process to finish
- Copy the emails that you will find by clicking on the Email Extractor extension
For example:
Final result:
This extension offers a paid offer to extract emails in text format but honestly you don't need it.
Just copy and paste items yourself into a Google Sheets and pass on any duplicates or erroneous emails.
Pay attention to legality or ethics
If the majority of your targets are B2C, don't forget to promote direct contact points on Instagram in the first place.
It is not allowed under the GDPR to keep contact details and to contact individuals who have not given their consent.
If you still want to give it a try, be sure that the majority will not classify you as SPAM or report you to the CNIL.
You can read one of my articles on this subject:
READ MORE: Is Web Scraping Legal?
Check your emails
You will never be sure of the validity or not of the emails you are going to retrieve.
To avoid bounce rates that will penalize the reputation of your domain name, be sure to check their validity before sending.
READ MORE: Find validation tools in the Email & Marketing Automation section
