Of Instagram and Followers for hackers
I built a very basic tool that automatically likes pictures based on a hashtag in Instagram.
Edit: since then I transformed this tool in a product to gain followers and like automatically called KeplerBot — it’s a very premium instagram bot with spam filtering and private proxy
On Instagram, I think it’s either difficult or too time consuming to get people’s attention from inside the app; so I tried to automate a part of this process. Nothing big, but I think this experiment was interesting and provided the chance to observe how people react on Instagram.
Days before the 2014 techcrunch disrupt NY hackathon, I tried it with no-tech: posting a picture on Instagram right after I liked all the pictures of a related hashtag. The return of follows / likes was pretty big. I decided to automate the process so I built a tool and called it Likestagram.
You just have to enter your hashtag and click on “Raise Awareness!” The app will then like the pictures with that specific hashtag. Instagram doesn’t display more than 8 pictures you have liked in their feed, so nobody will see the pictures you have liked to get attention. Even if it could be a tool for really bad growth hacking, in the end you are still targeting the people you want to reach. The follows you gain usually end up being interesting or rewarding for both you and the other user.
It was done using Ruby, Sinatra, Instagram, Haml gems.
The limit of the API will make the test really bad for you but you can try it out here anyway: http://likestagram.herokuapp.com, if you get an internal error it’s because we reached the Instagram API limit and of course I’m not handling errors. (I’ll put it offline anytime soon anyway)
(To push the test forward, as I had very few Instagram followers, I bought a followers pack and the result of follow back was really higher.)
You can find me there: https://instagram.com/maximegermain
And you should really read this article on the Art World and Instagram.
max@gertrude.co
