Conduct market research across social and travel platforms

This skill analyzes market conditions, geographic opportunities, pricing, consumer behavior and product validation across Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, Booking.com and TripAdvisor, using Apify Actors. It selects an Actor for the research type, fetches its schema, runs it and produces structured market data plus a synthesized view of opportunities or risks.

Actors by research need:

• Market density and geospatial analysis: compass/crawler-google-places and compass/google-maps-extractor for business mapping.
• Regional interest: apify/google-trends-scraper for trend data.
• Pricing and demand: apify/facebook-marketplace-scraper.
• Facebook: events for event market analysis, groups for consumer needs, pages for the market landscape, page contact information for business density and photos for cultural insights.
• Instagram: hashtag research for niche targeting, apify/instagram-hashtag-stats for market sizing, reels for market activity, a comprehensive scraper for market intelligence and an API-based scraper for product launch research.
• Hospitality and tourism: voyager/booking-scraper for hotel data and maxcopell/tripadvisor-reviews for review analysis.

The workflow is a five-step checklist: identify the market research type, fetch the Actor schema via mcpc, ask the user for preferences, run the script and summarize findings. The schema call returns the Actor description and README, required and optional inputs and output fields when available. The user chooses between a quick answer displayed in chat, a full CSV export or a JSON export, and the number of results is set by the use case. The final summary reports the number of results, the file location, key market insights and suggested next steps such as deeper analysis or validation.

Use it when you need market sizing, regional demand, pricing, trend or consumer behavior data, when the task is to gather research inputs from maps, travel, Facebook, Instagram or trend sources, or when you need structured data with a view of opportunities or risks. It is not a substitute for environment-specific validation, testing or expert review, and it stops to ask for clarification if inputs, permissions, safety boundaries or success criteria are missing.

Inputs are the market, region or product idea and the platforms to research. Prerequisites are a .env file with APIFY_TOKEN, Node.js 20.6 or newer for --env-file support and the mcpc CLI.

node --env-file=.env ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/reference/scripts/run_actor.js \
  --actor "ACTOR_ID" \
  --input 'JSON_INPUT'

Output is a chat summary or a CSV or JSON file with a date-prefixed name. Error handling covers a missing token, a missing mcpc, an unknown Actor, a failed run (check the Apify console link) and a timeout (reduce input size or raise --timeout).

It uses Apify Actors, the mcpc CLI against mcp.apify.com, Node.js and the run_actor.js script in the plugin's reference scripts folder.

Founders, product managers, strategists and analysts validating a market, sizing demand or comparing regions and pricing without building custom scrapers.