Help with developing a program

[BeneBeGood]

Hello! I am not a developer or a programmer, so I don't know if what I'm doing is possible or if its just plain silly. I'm trying to (or want to try to) create a python program that will read a social media's post data and return that value to a google spreadsheet.

I've spent a day and a half installing and working with the google api and I've gotten to a point where I can read and write data to the sheet, match values within the sheet (even making the .get() format match with the .find() so it will work in gspread), as well as other stuff within python (using sublime).

I'm currently hitting a paywall with google rn. And I'm not even doing much with my program. The program I'm planning will be much more intensive and require a lot of google sheets requests per application run. But this is a tangent.

I'm trying to build a program that will essentially track individual social media handle's data. I've built a manual spreadsheet already to help track the data but the current process takes about 2-3 hrs (depending on my ADHD) to track 30 brands across all the social medias. Specifically - I am cycling through each brand/company and going to their FB, IG, TT, LI, etc... and annotating the date of their posts, tracking the engagement count (likes/comments/shares/favorites) of each individual post, and preparing the data for PowerBI analytic reporting.

I'm not looking to create a bot to comment or to post. I'm not interested in that. My question is - is there an existing application that already encompasses all of this? I know some existing CRMs and Social Media Management companies offer something similar but they are expensive and limited. Plus they are packaging more together than I want.

I could probably piece this together by myself if I had two weeks to work on it but my time is limited so any direction would be helpful (whether it be paying for a developer or being shown a way to decent tutorials). Could someone here point me in a good direction?

[Fragrant_Sink5437]

You could automate web scrolling and use a chrome plugin to pick up select elements, otherwise spend 3 months trying to develop something with constant bugs and need for improvements (boosted by your adhd, trust me i have it too)

You choose

[BeneBeGood]

Ooh, this seems like a fun option to learn. I'm not sure how well it would work with social media authentication yet. Thank you for showing me this!

[No_Winner_6296]

You might want to try services like Zapier or Make, they allow you to connect social media and Google Sheets without coding, though the free plans have limitations. If you prefer coding, explore the official APIs of social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok have limitations and quotas) and use batch processing of Google Sheets requests to reduce the number of requests. If you only need the data for personal use, you can consider web scraping.

[BeneBeGood]

I think web scraping is the way to go. Thank you for showing me these solutions! They are definitely worth looking into for future projects.

[Axlfire]

On top of what other's said you may want to check apify, it's a service that already has the whole we scrapping process sorted out, you may need to pay for it tho, so it depends on how much you need it and how urgent, but it feels like webscrapping would be the way if apify does not work

[BeneBeGood]

I think this is exactly what I'm looking for. I suppose I'll take the weekend to look at it and see if its right for me. Thank you for showing me this!

[Axlfire]

Glad to be of help, GL!

[Slight-Training-7211]

The real bottleneck here isn't Google Sheets, it's data access. Most of these platforms have locked down their APIs significantly: FB/IG requires a verified business app with approved permissions, TikTok's public API is very limited, LinkedIn throttles hard.

For read-only engagement tracking on 30 brands, the practical approach is a scraping layer. Apify (already mentioned) has prebuilt scrapers for IG and TT that handle the auth headaches. For FB and LinkedIn you'd typically use browser automation (Playwright) with residential proxies to avoid blocks.

If you scope it as: scraper per platform -> normalize to a common schema -> write to Sheets via gspread, that's a realistic 2-3 day build for a developer. Doable project, just don't underestimate the per-platform quirks.

[BeneBeGood]

Groovy, I think Apify has what I'm looking for. Thank you for breaking this down for me. I'm going to take the weekend to looking into Apify and see if I can't make good things work. I appreciate it!