In this post, I'm going to track the engagement of a single Instagram post in real time using the open source Python Instagram scraping library instascrape 🐍.

For the purposes of this blog post, we'll be scraping a single post across one hour. This can easily be extended however to span more posts over longer periods of time with just a couple modifications.

The script

Since instascrape abstracts out a lot of the tedious work, the script is relatively straightforward:

import time 
import datetime 

import instascrape

def track_post(url: str):
    """
    Return a list of datetimes and a list of strings from an 
    Instagram post scraped across a one hour period.
    """ 
    times = [] 
    likes = []
    now = datetime.datetime.now()
    end_time = now + datetime.timedelta(hours=1)

    while now < end_time:
        time.sleep(60)     

        post = instascrape.Post(url) 
        post.scrape()

        now = datetime.datetime.now()

        times.append(now)
        likes.append(post.likes)
    return times, likes

Now all we have to do is pass a valid Instagram post URL to track_post, wait an hour, and we'll have our data! ⌚

Collecting the data

dates, likes = track_post('https://www.instagram.com/p/CH3E7omnUBj/')

Great! Now plotting our data using matplotlib gives us

In conclusion

Therefore, we're able to track growth of an Instagram post using instascrape very easily 🙌. This was just a simple example but can have many applications. You can compare growth at different times of day, track how your posts perform over time, analyze how posts grow, etc.

If you're interested in learning more about instascrape, check out some of my other blog posts

Scraping 25,000 data points from Joe Biden's Instagram using instascrape

Chris Greening ・ Nov 5 ・ 2 min read

#showdev #python #datascience #contributorswanted

Visualizing Instagram engagement with instascrape and Python

Chris Greening ・ Oct 21 ・ 3 min read

#python #datascience #opensource #hacktoberfest

or better yet, drop the official repository a star ⭐ and get involved with contributions!