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Scraping the Foursquare API
Foursquare offers one of the world’s most comprehensive venues databases through its developer platform, specifically its Places Data API.
While many people find this data valuable for on-demand access, such as use in mobile apps or for realtime data, an underrated use for many small business or marketing agency owners is the business data inside of Foursquare, which seems to rival the coverage that Google Maps offers. Furthermore, Foursquare offers a lot of data that the Google Maps API leaves out, such as email addresses, social media handles, food menus, and popularity data.
If you need to scrape businesses in any local region for lead generation or market research, you should definitely consider Foursquare as we make their API incredibly easy to use for the purpose of scraping data.
Free API Access
To access the Places API, you can start with by using a free personal account (scroll down) and you’ll be able to make $200 worth requests per month, which should be more than enough to get started to scrape thousands of businesses and contact information.
Email Scraping
The best thing about the Foursquare API is that it returns publicly available emails for businesses as well as social media handles (no other API does this, for free at least)! Check out the Places Search integration we have on this page to get started and see for yourself!
You an also watch the video to see exactly how we’re able to use the Foursquare API to query any local market and scrape businesses of a particular category. From there, we can extract out the emails and social media handles (so you get links to their Instagram profiles for example) into CSV files.