postup

Maximizing your social media presence

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Individual work completed in the course Software Structures for User Interfaces.

Source Code

People like to speculate about the best time to post on social media, but few resources exist that provide real insight into this. Although Facebook offers analytics to organizations that pay to advertise on its platform, it does not provide such information to its core users.

postUP fills this information gap by enabling users to track how many of their Facebook friends are online throughout the week and suggesting optimal posting times. Users can then use this information to determine when may be the best time to make Facebook posts in order to receive maximum visibility.

Infrastructure

Backend

postUp is made with a Django REST Framework (DRF) backend and uses the framework's built in SQLite database. The API contains DRF enabled Token Authentication to authenticate users.

To acquire data on how many friends are online at any given moment, the system uses an open sourced python script. The script utilizes chrome web driver and selenium to log into one’s FB account automatically and scrape the data at given intervals.

A special thanks to Adam Markon for helping me configure the API.

Frontend

The frontend is built with React. The components such as buttons, textfields, etc, are implemented with Material-UI, a library that formats google's material design into react components. The graphical elements were made in p5 using a p5-React wrapper.

Sources

Python Script To Scrape Friend Data | Django Rest Framework - React Reference | Material-UI

Demo

User Flow

Users will first login or create an account. They they must input their Facebook password so that the backend can log into their account and start gathering data. Once enough data is gathered, they may begin to analyze their results and determine optimal posting times.

Postup