Instagram & Facebook API Guides

API clients fail in production for one of two reasons: they ignore rate limits, or they retry the wrong things. This guide is the playbook we give every integrator of getsocialapi.com — it generalizes to any cursor-paginated API.

Every influencer deal, marketplace onboarding and UGC campaign eventually asks: is this engagement real? No single metric proves it — but a short battery of API checks catches most purchased engagement, because fakes are cheap and APIs see the seams. This is the checklist, endpoint by endpoint.

Most feed integrations want the same thing: a stream of posts, in small pages, from either a profile or a group — without wiring two different pipelines. The unified feed endpoint does exactly that: one route, two targets.

Facebook exposes three distinct connection lists, and product teams routinely conflate them. They answer different questions, they are built differently, and mixing them up poisons every metric built on top. Here is the disambiguation, with the endpoint for each.

Every Facebook group scraping task eventually hits the same wall: the member list is paginated in small pages, and naive collection loses people at the seams. This guide shows the exact protocol we use in production at GetSocialAPI — the same one the group members endpoint implements.

A Facebook group feed is not a flat list of posts. It mixes real posts with section headers ("New members", "Suggested for you") and promotions — and a naive collector happily saves the noise as content. Here is what the group posts endpoint actually returns and how to walk it.

Every Facebook pipeline starts with the same two questions: which entity is this URL, and what does the world see of it. Facebook URLs are notoriously polymorphic — profiles, pages, groups, posts, profile.php?id= forms, people/ aliases — and guessing wrong wastes every downstream call. Two endpoints settle it.

Before trusting an Instagram account — a seller in your marketplace, an influencer pitch, a counterparty in a deal — you check the About this account screen: which country the account declares, when it was created, how many usernames it burned through. That screen has an API counterpart, and it is one call: GET /user/about/{user_id}.