Social networks are gaining more and more popularity, replacing real communication. Due to the use of social networks, the ratings of companies increase, purchases of various products are made, famous people show their everyday life, etc. It takes a whole team of people to properly promote a certain product or service. There is usually one or more media persons who appear most often in the frame, videographer and photographer, analyst, proofreader, SMM, editor, and many others. When running his own blog, for example, the blogger monitors his activity personally, or with the help of a special specialist, and can predict whether the displayed material will gain popularity and who will be invited to view the created content. Modeling such a system will help to understand the logic of social network algorithms and, having collected real data, investigate them [1].
The main problem for testing and analyzing such systems is the accumulation of real data. To do this, it is necessary to have access to the real page of the user on Instagram [2], it is necessary to develop a system for finding elements on the web page with user simulation in real time and a data store for their remote processing and modeling [3].
The first element in Fig.1. there is a website, a real system of a personal page in a social network, through which it is possible to manage it automatically and accumulate data for further processing. Selenium works on the basis of the JSON Wire Protocol, which is the usual web service requests using the HTTP data transfer protocol. The next element in the block diagram is the Selenium system or framework for finding elements on a web page [4].
Fig. 1. Block diagram of simulation of the storage system
DOM (Document object model) elements on a page can be searched using the following methods:
- xPath: search for elements in the DOM tree of the web page up and down
- CSS: search for elements based on CSS (cascading style sheet) styles with the ability to move only down the DOM tree
- ID: element identifier
- Class: the class to which the element belongs
- Name: finding an element according to the found attribute in a certain tag, etc.
In addition, Selenium contains 3 more components that help to work with the efficiency of the tested program by dividing its launch on different machines and on different services remotely, etc.
The last element in the block diagram is the storage location of the found data in each of the found elements on the page. In this case, they are saved automatically using the MySQL relational database [5]. It is the relational database that will help consolidate all collected data and place them in separate tables for further processing and modeling.
When modeling the accumulated data, it will be possible to see the regularity of the number of likes of a certain publication with the popularity of a certain person, the activity and promotion of a publication depending on the time of publication, the dependence of preferences on people's places of residence, etc.
In the process of data collection, there is a problem with the operation of automated tests in the Instagram social network. This is due to the fact that usually social networks block automated actions on the web page for security purposes. The solution to such a problem can be short data collection sessions. The time spent on data collection depends on the number of subscribers and the activities of other users on the test page.
In the future, it is planned to use this data to conduct analytics and observe certain patterns. Thus, from the statistical data it will be possible to obtain results for the successful promotion of the content of other users.
In summary, it is possible to optimize and improve the effectiveness of the algorithms of certain social networks, to choose more suitable algorithms for the proposed publications to a certain user, to increase the activity of the weblog and to reduce the costs of creating content.
References:
1. Pavlyshenko, Bohdan. (2022). Methods of Informational Trends Analytics and Fake News Detection on Twitter. doi: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2204.04891
2. Yang, Chen. (2021). Research in the Instagram Context: Approaches and Methods. The Journal of Social Sciences Research. 7. 15-21. doi: https://doi.org/10.32861/jssr.71.15.21.
3. Paradis E, O'Brien B, Nimmon L, Bandiera G, Martimianakis MA. Design: Selection of Data Collection Methods. J Grad Med Educ. 2016 May;8(2):263-4. doi: https://doi.org/10.4300/JGME-D-16-00098.1.
4. Finding web elements in Selenium. Available online: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/webdriver/elements/finders/ (accessed on 27 September 2022).
5. Letkowski, Jerzy. (2015). Doing database design with MySQL. Journal of Technology Research. Volume 6.