Automating Instagram Activities and Analysis: A Survey of Existing Tools

Abstract

Instagram serves as a modern advertising channel for many business sectors. For a business Instagram account to be effective in advertising, they need to be active and reach the current and potential clients constantly. A common way to achieve that is to hire workers to keep the accounts active by, for example, liking and commenting on photos and video. However, this process is time and money consuming. In addition, data associated with accounts present a valuable information to guide business plans. Since the data usually large, data analysis has to be completed in an automated fashion. Therefore, it is important to automate both Instagram activities and data analysis. However, it is not clear if such tools are available. In this paper, we survey the existing tools within the context of automations. We investigate the capability of the current tools to perform Instagram activities and data analysis in an automated fashion. An important factor we added to our investigation is whether the tools are free and open source. We found that there is an urgent need for both free and open source tools to support especially small emerging business. This paper should serve as a reference about current tools for business companies at different scale. Also, it helps tools? developers to design and implement tools that are better serve the current business needs. To understand the automation in Instagram, we proposed a simple automation layered architecture. This should help in understanding current tools and develop new ones.