Top 30 Zimbabwean Influencers Scraper

An Apify actor that produces one combined top-30 ranking of Zimbabwean social media influencers, sorted by their total followers across YouTube, Facebook, Twitter/X and TikTok. Each dataset row contains the influencer's name, profile picture, per-platform follower counts, and profile URLs.

How it works

No site ranks Zimbabweans across all four platforms, so the actor works in three stages:

1. Candidate pool — starts from a curated seed list of ~40 well-known Zimbabwean public figures (src/seeds.js), merges in any extraCandidates from the actor input, and (optionally) auto-discovers more from public country rankings (StarNgage TikTok Zimbabwe, Social Blade YouTube Zimbabwe).
2. Live enrichment — for every candidate:
   • YouTube: scraped from the channel page, or fetched from the official (free) YouTube Data API if you provide youtubeApiKey.
   • TikTok: scraped from the profile page (use Apify residential proxies — TikTok blocks datacenter IPs).
   • Twitter/X and Facebook: these platforms block anonymous scraping, so counts come from one batched call each to an Apify Store actor (apidojo/twitter-user-scraper, apify/facebook-pages-scraper). This consumes Apify credits; disable via useStoreActorsForTwitter / useStoreActorsForFacebook if you'd rather have nulls.
3. Ranking — sums available follower counts per person, sorts descending, keeps the top maxItems (default 30), and pushes them to the default dataset.

Output format

{
  "rank": 1,
  "name": "Mufti Menk",
  "country": "Zimbabwe",
  "profilePicture": "https://yt3.googleusercontent.com/...",
  "totalFollowers": 6310000,
  "youtubeFollowers": 6310000,
  "facebookFollowers": 5400000,
  "twitterFollowers": 7800000,
  "tiktokFollowers": 2100000,
  "youtubeUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@muftimenkofficial",
  "facebookUrl": "https://www.facebook.com/muftimenk",
  "twitterUrl": "https://x.com/muftimenk",
  "tiktokUrl": "https://www.tiktok.com/@muftimenkofficial",
  "platforms": { "youtube": { "...": "full per-platform detail incl. per-platform avatar" } },
  "scrapedAt": "2026-08-24T11:36:36.530Z"
}

The flat *Followers / *Url columns make CSV/Excel export clean; the nested platforms object carries full detail (per-platform avatars, matched display names).

Running locally

npm install
npm start

Local input goes in storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json. A cheap test run:

{
  "maxCandidates": 6,
  "discoverFromRankings": false,
  "useStoreActorsForTwitter": false,
  "useStoreActorsForFacebook": false,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false }
}

Note: locally without an Apify account/token, proxies and Store-actor calls are unavailable, so TikTok will often be blocked and Twitter/Facebook counts will be null. Full data requires running on the Apify platform (or locally with APIFY_TOKEN set).

Deploying to Apify

npm install -g apify-cli
apify login
apify push

Then run it from the Apify Console. For fresh data on a schedule, add a Schedule in the Console (e.g. weekly) — the dataset from the latest run is always available via the Apify API as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Important caveats

• The ranking is only as complete as the candidate pool. Someone missing from the seed list and the discovery sources cannot appear. Verify and extend src/seeds.js (or pass extraCandidates in the input) — several seeded handles are best-effort guesses and unresolved ones are logged as warnings and skipped.
• Nationality is curated, not detected. Scrapers can't verify who is Zimbabwean; the seed list is the source of truth. Diaspora celebrities (Tinashe, Danai Gurira) are excluded unless includeDiaspora is true.
• Twitter/Facebook data costs credits via the Store actors; a run over ~40 candidates costs a small amount. With both disabled the actor is free to run but ranks on YouTube + TikTok only.
• TikTok needs residential proxies (proxyConfiguration with the RESIDENTIAL group) for reliable results.