The process of gaining an audience is an expensive and challenging task. If you want to establish an audience relevant to your needs and have a common interest, it’s more complicated. I’ve always believed that Instagram is a fantastic platform to showcase my work. However, I did not have more than 350 users… At least one time, I’ll decide to begin posting photos on Instagram again. I can frequently post for a few months; however, it doesn’t last longer than a couple of months. I don’t have enough people following me to stay on track and active. Click here
This campaign aims to create a larger audience and, as a bonus, perhaps drive some people to my site, where I will sell my photographs
One year ago, during my final Instagram trip, I discovered an app that lets you know who has unfollowed you. I was interested because my followers’ numbers sometimes dropped without explanation. After some investigation, I found that certain users search for followers. They post comments and likes and follow other users hoping for an answer. Then they unfollow them within the next few days.
It wasn’t an unwelcome surprise for me that there were bots on Instagram… The fact that there were bots on Instagram was a good reminder to create one of my own!
This is the reason we’re here. So let’s start! I created a straightforward bot written that I wrote in Python when I was playing using Selenium to find a way to utilize it in a project. In simple terms, Selenium is a browser that you can use quickly using Python.
I believe that increasing my Instagram followers is a way to help me stay motivated to post frequently. In addition note, I have added my website to my bio on my profile so that users can purchase pictures. I believe it’s a little over the top, but who knows? My sales have been essentially zero, so it’s easy to track the conversion!
If you’d want access to my other web scraping posts — as well as every other article on Medium, have you thought about signing up? This would support my work immensely!
Read the latest stories on Medium!
If you are a Medium member, you will receive a percentage of the membership fee given to authors
you’ve read, and you are granted full access to all stories..
Just what we needed! Yet another Instagram robot…
After considering the idea, I realized that my goal was to grow my following with people who were relevant to my work. I want to attract followers who would like to follow my blog and read more about my work. It’s pretty easy to find bizarre content on the most searched-for hashtags, so I’ve created this bot to search for specific hashtags and engage with posted images. In this way, I can be particular about the kind of interest I want my viewers to share. For instance, I enjoy long exposures. I could target those who follow this hashtag and create an audience for this type of content. Simple and effective!
My gallery is a mixture of various themes and styles, from street photography to aerial photography and a few travel-related photos. As it’s where I grew up, I also have a lot of Lisbon photos from Lisbon. These will be the primary topics I’ll choose to use for the hashtags I’d like to focus on.
What kind of numbers are we talking about?
I used the bot at least a couple of times with various hashtags such as “travel blogger,” “travelgram,” “Lisbon,” and “drone photography.” Over three days, I grew from 380 followers to 800. Many likes, comments, and some growth organically (people who followed me but weren’t following my bot).
To clarify, I’m not using this bot agitatedly because Instagram stops responding when you use it too quickly. It is essential to include sleep commands to help it sleep between actions because, after a certain number of comments and followers within a brief period, Instagram does not respond, and the program goes down.
You’ll be logged in to your account, and I’m pretty sure Instagram is aware that there’s something wrong when you accelerate the process. The most important thing is that after you’ve done this for about a hundred hashtags, it gets more difficult for new people to join within similar hashtags. It is necessary to give it a couple of days to replenish the existing users.
But I don’t wish to be a follower of so many in the same way…
The best method to gain followers on Instagram (apart from posting awesome pictures!) is to follow other users. The bot performed well for me since I don’t mind if I follow 2000 people to earn 400 followers.
The bot stores a list of all users followed when it was running. So, one day I might implement something using the index. For example, I could go to each user profile, look at the number of followers or posts they’ve had and decide if they wish to continue following them. Also, I can download the first photo in their gallery and verify the date to verify whether they’re active users.
If we eliminate the follow button in the bot’s settings, I can tell that the growth rate will decrease since users are less likely to follow based on a single comment or like.
Why would you want to give away your code?!
That’s what I debated with myself. Although I believe giving back is a way to give back to society (I still get many things from it! ), many paid platforms accomplish similar stuff like this project. Some are not so good, and famous people utilize some. The possibility of launching a twin platform for myself is not out of the realm, but why would I offer the code?
With this in mind, I thought of adding a challenge to the process, so I planned to upload my code as an image. I said “was” because I’ve noticed that the impression I’m receiving isn’t of the highest quality. That made me think about it and write the details. You’re so pretty! The reason for the picture was that if you wanted to use it, you’d need to write the code yourself. This was my method to limit the tool’s usage to users who have to go through the entire process of creating it and possibly even enhance it.
I’ve learned more by typing the code myself instead of copying and pasting scripts. I hope you’re feeling the same in the same way!
This script may not be as well-developed as it can be, and I’m sure there’s plenty of room to improve it. But… it’s working! I’m working on other projects I’d like to include in my portfolio. Therefore my time to work on it further is pretty constrained. However, I’ll try to improve this article should I continue to dig.
This is the final subtitle!
You’ll require Python (I’m currently using Python 3.7), Selenium, and the web browser (in my case, I’m making use of Google Chrome)… clearly the most important thing is the ability to create an Instagram account! An overview of the functions of the bot: check now(https://superviral.uk/)
Log in to a browser using your credentials.
If you’ve made it to this point, I am grateful! You are deserving of your prize! If you have found this helpful to your brand or profile by any means, please comment below about your experience š
To use Chrome with Selenium, it is necessary to install the chrome driver. It’s an easy process, and I’ve had no problems with it. Install and change the path that you have previously installed. Once you’ve done this, the variable webdriver will become the Chrome tab.
You must replace the string with your username and password in cell three. This will allow the bot to enter it into the fields it displays. You might have observed that while running cell 2, Chrome opened the new tab. After entering the password, I’ll classify that login as an object, and then in the next paragraph, I press it.
If you’re wondering what those strange strings are, Don’t worry! In my post about scraping a real estate site, I’ve had to complete the same process, which involved examining the pages on the internet to show the robot where to go. You can accomplish this task by simply pressing the right button on the area you’d like to map and selecting inspect.
Once you’re in inspect mode, locate the HTML code that matches what you’re looking to map. Right-click it, and then click on Copy. You will appear to have a few options about how you want it copied. I employed a combination of XPath and CSS selectors in the code. It took me some time to ensure that all references worked smoothly. Sometimes, the CSS or XPath directions would be ineffective; however, as I adjusted the sleep time, everything began functioning smoothly.
In this instance, I used “copy selector” and pasted it into a find_element_method (cell 3, cell). It will return the first result it comes across. In the case of find_elements_ all elements will be found, and you can specify the ones you want.
When you’re done, then it’s time to start the loop. It is possible to add additional hashtags to the hashtag list. If you try this for the first time, you don’t have a file containing the hashtags you followed. You could create a prev_user_list with an unfilled list.
After you run it once, it will save a CSV file with the time stamp of the people it matched. The file will then be used as the user list you will use for the second time you run it. It is simple and easy to keep on top of the bot’s actions.
Update the timestamp to reflect the current time for the next run, and you’ll get CSV backlogs for each bot’s execution.
