TikTok Follower Tracker
The “TikTok Count” is a measuring contest of how big one’s TikTok followers list is compared to other users. A large number can be very impressive, assuming the outbound TikTok follow list is relatively small (who the account is following), and can indicate popular & influential users on TikTok, who are good at discovering short form content ideas that get on the FYP (for you page). This has resulted in several TikTok username tracker websites which are largely ad-supported and show the count in real time.
You may be wondering how these work - if they scrape the individual TikTok followers or use a web scraping tool to get the followers list to update their TikTok counter. The answer is that these sites use some sort of TikTok scraper, which typically rely on web scraping TikTok users on an ongoing basis to capture updated statistics from the social network.
Scraping TikTok Profiles
If you’re looking to build a similar tool or capture this data yourself, you’ll need to consider TikTok data scraping from either these aggregation websites (not recommended), or figure out how these websites are performing their data extraction.
The rest of this article will explain how to extract data from TikTok on the raw follower counts for a list of TikTok influencers using TikAPI, the unofficial TikTok API making the scraping process extremely easy and doesn’t require you purchase a separate proxy service.
Sign Up for TikAPI
You can evaluate TikAPI for 5 days at no charge. Just visit their site and sign up, then you’ll receive an API key you can use to follow the rest of this article. You may also want to reach out to their customer support if you’re not comfortable providing payment information upfront and they can send you a free trial key like they did with us.
Disclaimer: We were provided with a free API key from TikAPI for the purposes of evaluating their service and writing this article, but we were not compensated in any other way to promote their service.
Get the User’s Follower Count
Once you have access to TikAPI, you’ll want to see the User Profile Information Endpoint, which accepts a username as its input. This will work with any public TikTok account, just remove the @ sign and enter it into the API. E.g. to check the follower count for https://www.tiktok.com/@garyvee you would provide garyvee as the username to the API endpoint.
The TikAPI will respond with the count (rounded out of course) in the userInfo.stats section as follows:
Bulk Scraping Follower Counts
If you’re looking to scrape a list of users (perhaps potential influencers, clients, etc…) and collect their stats (with follower count) into a single CSV file you can use and track, you may be interested in the TikTok User Details - Multiple Usernames Workflow (this is a paid service separate from TikAPI). You’ll be able to enter a list of usernames here and then download the results as a single CSV file you can then upload into Google Sheets or any other service that works with CSV files.