It takes a substantial amount of effort to establish and maintain any significant degree of social media presence. If you’re going to use bots to automate posting at primetime, run some data scraping, or are handling multiple simultaneous accounts, you can benefit greatly by using proxies for social media management.
Whether you are marketing your brand, striving to be or already are an influencer, or are managing accounts for others, you need to make regular updates and interact with your followers. It’s all well and good if you’re going for affiliate marketing, but you need loyal fans that will click those links to buy the goods, right? You just need to queue up those advance posts and be confident that your bot has it covered.
Also, I shouldn’t fail to mention how several social media platforms have forms of geo-locking, which is yet another reason to look into a reliable proxy.
There are a lot of good proxy options out there, some of which are covered in-depth in the articles I linked above. So, allow me to cover a few other options that can also satisfy your social media proxy needs. I’ll start with the smaller-scale tighter budget option, and work my way up from there.
Stormproxies is a relatively young proxy service provider, established back in 2016. Granted, anything that happened pre-pandemic feels like a lifetime ago. Let’s dive right in on some of the pros of their service.
They’re one of the cheapest reliable providers on the market. As if that isn’t good enough, they’ll give you unlimited bandwidth with no sneaky hidden fees. They also offer an up to 48-hour full refund depending on your subscription type.
One thing to consider doing is starting with a basic subscription plan to test things out. If you’re satisfied with their services while still wanting more, bump up your plan for that extra goodness. Just make sure you account for the fact that only their rotating proxies have the full 48 hour refund period. Their other services generally only offer a 2-hour window.
One more nice thing is that you get instant access as soon as you sign up. No hoops to jump through, or any elaborate account authorizations. But, of course, nothing’s perfect.
Stormproxies doesn’t offer any free trials. Not that I can blame them, with how often free trials get abused.
Their speeds are… middling. If you want high speed, you need to cough up more dough. They’re still pretty decent though, certainly better than any free service.
Their dashboard doesn’t provide many analytics or configuration options. But, considering you’re getting unlimited bandwidth, tracking your usage isn’t important, now is it? Those limited options are at least simple to use, too.
Stormproxies is a small-scale service with a modest pool of 70,000 IP addresses. For comparison’s sake, high-end premium services often boast several million. There had to be reasons as to why they’re so cheap though, right?
For any large-scale operations, you’re probably going to want to look at one of the more expensive service providers, like Bright Data, Oxylabs, or Smartproxy. But, for any small-scale stuff, they will have you covered.
Now, let’s go over an in-the-middle option. They’re still plenty affordable, but you do have to pay to get the bigger perks. You’re just not going all the way into top-tier premium service territory, which is admittedly not for everyone.
RSocks is a flexible provider that supports every kind of protocol: HTTP/S, SOCKS4/4A/5. Just like their extensive protocol coverage, they also offer every style of proxy you could hope for. They were founded in 2015 and they made the change from private use to publicly serving customers in 2016.
Like before, let’s get right to it then, shall we?
They boast a respectable pool of 13,000,000 IPs. This is an updated quantity from the 8,000,000 which you may see cited in older articles mentioning them.
They provide unlimited bandwidth, as you’re paying for the number of ports or connections based on your chosen plan.
Depending on what you’re looking to do, they have variable time options; by the hour, day, week, or month. Not only are their time options diverse, but the number of proxies in your plan can range from 10 to 140,000, covering any size task.
They have an in-house rotation function, which can rotate your IPs every 5 minutes. It’s great for mass botting, though you might not want to have it on while you’re managing accounts that you don’t want social media platforms to question.
RSocks’ customer support is top-notch, featuring a 24/7 live chat service alongside standard email submissions. But, you are unlikely to need it, as they have a robust FAQ to answer your potential questions.
They have an easy-to-use dashboard, although it isn’t highly customizable. It still has its fair share of features though, while providing a range of useful statistics.
They offer a free trial on their plans. Unfortunately, it has rather limited features and a one-hour limit. Their refund policy is also fairly strict, but it is at least an option as long as you still meet the criteria.
They offer a few free proxy servers that are more limited than their paid options. There are a lot of questionable free proxy services out there. If you’re going to use one, at least make sure it’s from a reputable company like RSocks.
Last, but not least, they accept a wide variety of payment methods. On top of standard methods, they also take two types of cryptocurrencies; Bitcoin and Ethereum.
RSocks, despite their large IP pool, has very limited geo-location options. They may have proxies in 68 countries, but they only let you select residential proxies from 4 of them, and these are the best proxies for social media. That shortlist is the USA, Europe, China, and Russia.
So, if you were hoping for any geo-location options other than those, you should scroll back up to Stormproxies. Or, if you’re in the big boys league, push on to our final featured proxy service provider, Infatica.
Infatica is young considering it was established in 2019, but it is by no means lacking. In that short time, they have already amassed a pool of 10,000,000 IPs. Their proxy options are residential, mobile, and datacenter with HTTP/HTTPS support and some preliminary expansion into SOCKS5.
While the previously mentioned Stormproxies is a good option for small-scale operations, Infatica is the decisive victor when it comes to corporate-level needs.
If you’ve stuck with me this far, surely you’re looking forward to those pros and cons, aren’t you? Well then, let’s go!
That aforementioned 10,000,000 IP pool is worth reiterating. RSocks may have passed them in quantity, but that doesn’t invalidate the fact that 10 million is still a respectable number.
They grant you full control over handling your proxies for social media. The previous two had fairly limited options, but Infatica grants you in-depth access to managing all of your wants and needs.
Even though there are numerous tools at your disposal, Infatica remains easy to use. First-time proxy users as well as people with little, if any, coding experience can master it before long.
Infatica has a fantastic connection speed and response time. If your main concern is speed, Infatica should be on your shortlist of proxy service providers on the market. Of course, their residential proxies aren’t quite as zippy as their datacenter proxies, but that’s one of the main perks of datacenter proxies in the first place. And you know that residential proxies for social media are way better than datacenter.
With all that being said, no provider is perfect.
Unlike a majority of other providers, Infatica requires some extra steps. You need to install a certificate to mitigate errors and warnings while using their proxies. It’s not a lot of work, but it’s still extra effort you normally don’t have to make.
While they have a lot of options, multiple functions are locked until you submit a request ticket. This includes setting up username and password authentication, and city-level targetting. Needing to wait for a customer representative to unlock some of their features is certainly an annoyance.
Even though they handle residential IPs all across the globe, their customer support team is predominantly English-speaking, with a few people that speak Russian. Considering that you need to submit a ticket and work with one of them to unlock some of the service’s offered functionality, this could potentially pose an issue. Since you just read this article, that presumably isn’t a problem for you, at least.
To optimize your social media management, you’ll need the right tools to reach your goals. Any bot or other such automation tool you’ll use will invariably need a proxy. If you’re not fully satisfied with the options presented in this article, you can run through some free trials to find what’s right for you.
There are tons of great proxies on the market, with even more not-so-great ones mixed in with them. Figuring out what is best for you is by no means an easy decision. Between Stormproxies, RSocks, and Infatica you have dependable options for every price range of suitable proxies for social media usage.
Cui: 45488166 J40/703/2022