The Best Social Media Proxy Providers of 2023
Social media proxies can do wonders for your social media project. You can create and manage multiple profiles without worrying about getting an IP or account ban, scrape public data to gain market insights, find influencers, or look for new business opportunities.
If you’re looking to buy proxies for social media automation, you’ve come to the right place. This page will list the five best social media proxy providers. We’ve tested and analyzed each service to make your choice easier. Let’s dive in and match you with a provider that exceeds your needs.
Here are our top picks:
- Smartproxy – best value social media proxies.
- Bright Data – feature-rich proxy service for most social media use cases.
- SOAX – quality mobile proxies for social media account management.
- Rayobyte – cheap mobile proxies for social media scraping.
Key Points about Social Media Proxies
- Social media proxies are optimized for platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
- Nowadays, social media proxies are mostly residential or mobile – they’re the hardest to block. With lenient platforms like Twitter or Reddit, you can also use dedicated datacenter proxies; they’re cheaper but easily detectable by websites.
- The main use cases include multiple account management and creation, unblocking, and scraping.
- Don’t use free proxies with social media – they’ll likely be blocked on popular platforms.
Learn more: What Are Social Media Proxies?
Tips and Tricks for Using Proxies for Social Media
- Consider your needs. Before sticking to a proxy service subscription, choose the right proxy type. Some proxies are more expensive than others and work with different use cases. For example, mobile proxies are the hardest to block but are costly.
- Search for a reliable proxy service. If you don’t want to damage your reputation or get into legal trouble, do your research before acquiring proxies. Legitimate proxy providers are transparent about how their proxies are sourced. A reliable service vets its customers and monitors proxy use.
- Respect the website’s guidelines. There are three critical guidelines you should know before automating your actions. Every website has instructions (a robots.txt file) to manage bot traffic. This is especially relevant for scraping – it shows what pages you can scrape. You should also read platforms’ terms of service, which sometimes include policies that prohibit you from certain automated activities. And most importantly, don’t scrape data behind a login. This can get you into legal trouble.
- Use an antidetect browser for multiple account management. If you’re a social media marketer and need to manage (or create) bulk accounts for your clients without a risk of blocking them, pair your proxies with an antidetect browser. It will spoof your digital fingerprint. This isn’t the fastest approach but definitely the safest.
- Don’t use too many IPs with one account. A good practice is one account per residential proxy and up to 5-8 per mobile IP.
How We Chose the Best Social Media Proxy Providers
To make a list of the best social media proxy providers, we tested a dozen services for the latest Proxy Market Research. We dwelled into the size and quality of each provider’s proxy pool, among other aspects. We also ran performance benchmarks with popular social media networks. Here are the results of the top five social media proxy providers.
Where to Buy the Best Social Media Proxies
Smartproxy offers great value for anyone who needs social media proxies. Its residential proxy network proved to be the fastest (around 2 seconds) on the most popular social media platforms. The proxy pool comes with 40 million rotating residential IPs from 195 different locations worldwide.
Smartproxy’s residential proxy plans include X-Browser, an antidetect browser that’s a great addition for multiple social media account management and creation. If you prefer to scrape without writing a custom script from scratch, Smartproxy offers Web Scraping API and No-Code Scraper.
Over the years, we’ve recognized Smartproxy’s services to have the best overall user experience: 24/7 customer support via most communication means, an extensive backlog of guides on social media automation, an easy-to-use dashboard, and other user-friendly perks.
However, despite all the praises, we seem to find downsides in every service. And Smartproxy is not an exception. If you need sticky sessions for, let’s say, account management, you’ll be limited to 30 minutes. What’s more, the provider doesn’t offer mobile proxies.
Features:
- 40 million peer-to-peer residential IPs
- 195 locations
- Rotation every request, sticky sessions up to 30 mins
- Unlimited connections and threads
- Whitelisted IP & user:pass authentication
- Pay-as-you-go option
Pricing: From $12.5 for 1 GB. 3-day refund available.
Bright Data is a premium proxy provider that offers all types of proxies. The provider has over 72 million residential and 7 million mobile IPs from around the world. Its residential proxies are a gold standard for social media account management – they come with features like country, state, city, ASN targeting, and flexible IP rotation options. Even though Bright Data’s residential proxies are almost twice as slow (over 4 seconds) compared to Smartproxy, their success rate passed the 99% limit.
The provider also puts a lot of energy into creating a strong web data collection infrastructure, so scraping enthusiasts should find all the necessary means for large-scale projects. It includes powerful proxy control tools like an open source proxy manager.
But the problems come down to money and difficulty setting up. Bright Data’s premium features cost a lot, and since it targets large-sized businesses, a single user might find the service overpriced.
Features:
- 72M peer-to-peer & 7M mobile IPs
- HTTP, HTTPS & SOCKS protocols
- Country, city, ASN and carrier targeting
- Rotation every request, sticky sessions available
- Pay-as-you-go option
Pricing: From $15 for 1 GB. 7-day trial for businesses and 3-day refund available.
SOAX has a pool of 3.5M mobile and 5M residential IP addresses . Its mobile proxies have flexible location targeting and rotation options, which is ideal for social media. The rotation options range from 90 to 600 seconds. What’s more, you can filter IPs by country, region, city, and ASN. SOAX’s mobile addresses reached a 96% success rate on social media, ranking among the top premium providers, just behind Bright Data.
The provider has a user-friendly dashboard with an onboarding wizard for newbies. Customer support is available via live chat, email, phone, and Telegram and typically responds within five minutes.
However, there are a few limitations to keep in mind when using – SOAX doesn’t support rotation with every connection request and offers a fixed number of ports with all plans. This limits its scraping potential.
Features:
- 3.5M mobile & 5M residential IPs
- Global locations with city & ASN targeting
- Rotation from 90 seconds to as long as the IP remains available
- Concurrent connections limited by plan
- Whitelisted IP & user:pass authentication
Pricing: Mobile proxy plans start from $99 for 3GB ($33/GB) + 300 ports. 3-day trial for $1.99 available.
Rayobyte (former Blazing SEO) offers residential and mobile IPs. Mobile proxies are based on dedicated devices rather than peer-to-peer networks. Its proxies rotate with high frequency, convenient to social media scraping. Rayobyte’s mobile proxies are cheaper compared to other providers like Bright Data and Oxylabs.
The provider uses a unique model that constantly rotates dedicated devices. While the service didn’t perform well in our tests (it’s still in beta), it generated many IPs over time with a limited number of devices. So, it may be suitable for web scraping tasks prioritizing unique IPs over speed.
However, since mobile proxies rotate often, they won’t work with social media automation where you need sticky sessions. Also, you might run out of IPs if you scrape at short intervals – Rayobyte restarts the devices, forcing mobile carriers to assign them a new address. So, we recommend sticking to longer stretches of time.
Features:
- Unknown pool size
- Supports HTTP(S) protocol
- Only US-based locations
- Rotation every request
- Unlimited connections
Pricing: Mobile proxy plans start from $50 for 2 GB ($25/GB).