I've recently started a job where I'm responsible for auditing social media accounts. Part of this involves calculating the average like count and identifying the top three posts with the highest engagement. While I've found it straightforward on platforms like TikTok and Facebook, Instagram complicates things since you can hide like counts. Currently, I have to manually tally the likes on each post, which is time-consuming, especially since I don't have login access. I'm considering creating a bot that could browse a profile, open each post, and count the likes automatically. Given my last coding experience was in 2017 with some basic Java games, I'm wondering how difficult this would be.
4 Answers
Look into whether Instagram has a dedicated API that fits your needs. That might give you a lot of what you’re looking for without the need to code a bot from scratch!
If the like counts are still visible in the DOM, it could be pretty easy to set this up. But speaking from experience, if you write it like you described, be ready to face some issues with anti-bot measures and potential changes to Instagram's layout that might mess up your code. Also, be cautious about any legal implications since Instagram doesn’t permit certain types of automated interactions. However, they do offer an API which might be an option for you, but you'll need to explain your project to get access.
You can definitely tackle this with JavaScript using puppeteer, and Python with beautiful soup works well too! To make it simpler, you could set it up to wait for you to log in to avoid captchas—solving captchas is doable but can be a pain. Just ensure you check out the Instagram API first—AI tools could even help streamline a lot of this for you too!
Before diving in, it might be worth checking if there are existing software solutions that can track Instagram analytics. There are definitely tools available that could save you the hassle of building something from scratch.
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