How to connect Apify to Claude (and why you should)

Short answer: Apify is a library of ready-made scrapers. Connecting it to Claude gives Claude the ability to read real social media data: your posts, their numbers, and anyone else's. Add the connector, give Claude access, then set a weekly job that pulls the last seven days and reports what actually performed. It takes about twenty minutes and it replaces the hour you spend checking posts by hand.

What Apify actually is

A marketplace of small programs that read public data from websites. One reads Instagram profiles, another reads TikTok, another Google Maps. You do not write them, you run them.

On its own that is mildly useful. Connected to Claude it becomes the difference between an assistant that can talk about your marketing and one that can look at it.

Why this one matters more than the others

Every other integration lets AI write things. This one lets it see results.

Without real numbers, AI content advice is just a confident guess with nice grammar. With them, it can tell you that your fourth best idea outperformed your favourite one by six times, which is the sort of thing you cannot argue with.

1. Make an Apify account

The free tier covers a weekly run for one or two accounts. You do not need a paid plan to start, and you will know within a fortnight whether it earns one.

2. Add the connector in Claude

In Claude, open Connectors and add Apify. You will be asked to authorise it, which is the usual sign-in flow. This is the same mechanism covered in what an MCP server is, and Apify having one is exactly why it is worth choosing.

3. Ask for one run by hand first

Before automating anything, ask Claude to pull your last ten posts and tell you which performed best against your own median, not in raw views. Do it once manually so you can see the shape of what comes back and correct it.

4. Put it on a schedule

Once the manual run is right, set it to run weekly. Friday afternoon works because the week's posts have had time to settle and you are planning the next one anyway.

What should it tell you?

Not a dump of numbers. Three things: which post did best against your own normal, what that post had in common with your other winners, and what to make more of next week.

If the output is a table you have to interpret, it will be ignored by the third week.

Will it surprise you?

Almost certainly, and that is the point. The post you were proud of is usually not the one that worked. People are consistently wrong about their own content, including me, and the only cure is the numbers.

How to set up your weekly Apify report in Claude

Twenty minutes gets you a report that ranks your own posts against your own average, which is the only comparison that tells you anything useful.

Start in Claude Cowork. Adding the Apify connector and asking for one run by hand is the whole job, and you want to see the first result yourself. Move it to Claude Code only when you want it running every Friday without you.

You need an Apify account on the free tier, your Instagram or TikTok handle, and about twenty minutes.

1. Create an Apify account and stay on the free tier. One or two accounts a week costs nothing.
2. Add Apify in Claude's Connectors and authorise it, the same sign-in flow as any other integration.
3. Run the prompt below once by hand, so you can see the shape of what comes back.
4. Correct the output until it tells you something you would actually act on.
5. Only then put it on a weekly schedule.

Using Apify, pull my last [20] posts from [PLATFORM] for the handle [YOUR HANDLE].

For each post get the caption, the opening line, the posting date and the engagement numbers.

Then tell me three things and nothing else:
1. Which posts beat MY OWN median, and by how much. Not raw views.
2. What those posts have in common. Look at the opening line, the format, the promise and the topic.
3. What I should make more of next week, in one sentence.

Rules:
- No tables I have to interpret. Write it the way you would say it to me.
- If a post did well for a reason that will not repeat, say so.
- If the data looks incomplete, tell me rather than working around it.

Expect it to disagree with you. The post you were proud of is usually not the one that worked, and that is the whole reason to connect real numbers in the first place.

Where to start this week

Make the account, add the connector, and ask for one thing: your ten most recent posts ranked against your own median. Read it before you build anything else.

If you want help setting this up properly for your business, have a look at how I work.