NOT a follow and unfollow bot that gets you banned and restricted, but build apps that would actually assist in organic Instagram growth.
I have been doing a lot of research online lately on ways to use python to grow Instagram, but all I have come across are posts on making bots to automate the follow then unfollow strategy. I don't like that idea, because my followers won't be genuine and my account will likely be banned or restricted. As a fellow data scientist, I believe in Instagram's data scientists to detect such anomalies...the pattern is obvious...
From learning about social media marketing and talking to my fellow Instagram community, I have decided the one thing I could be doing better is to improve my hashtag game...and that is where I will start... You may tell me there are apps doing that already...I know, but I just want to see if I can build one myself and tailored to my taste...
In terms of hashtags, the good rule of thumb to follow is to find hashtags which are compound words with results volume under 1 million and to switch it up every day... Now I don't know about other people, but I have a hard time thinking of hashtags and I am too lazy to do different ones everyday. So a randomizer would be helpful and a library of hashtags would be good. Note I tried to do a root and suffix random combination to generate the tags...the search volume is just too low...
I am using Anvil (https://anvil.works/), because it seems so cool to code in Python and they output as an app. Saves me the time of learning Flask from scratch...which I will also do...
Here is my plan:
Figure out a safe way to scrape post hashtags without alerting Instagram... Now some will say there are packages that does Instagram scrapes... Mind you I tried a lot of them and all of them I hit the login required error, they really have been doubling down on scrapes... So I think I must use the old fashioned Selenium way, if others have better idea please let me know.
Figure out a safe way to extract search volume data off of Instagram so I can use it filter hashtags for use
Hashtags need to be categorized for different kinds of posts, so I could just do a simple keyword selection and then it generates the relevant hashtags, but I would want a mix. Maybe a simple sentiment label on each hashtag could be made...who knows
I would want to monitor which hashtags that are in my library are growing or trending...in this case it depends on step 2.
I have also been looking into Google Trends API, seems very interesting and cool to automate for a daily report on who or which topic are hot and use those in hashtags.
This is getting into the grey zone area, but it makes me really excited to see what is possible. If you scrape your own account on follower information, is it possible then to know more realistically when they are active online, because the Instagram analytics information is not very telling or statistically sound at all...
Lastly, if anyone else is interested in a project like this and wants to try things together, please let me know I would love to collaborate together.
For those who are interested in tracking my progress with the app, here is an embedding of it. Right now it's just randomly generating hashtags from the list I have collected.
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