Instagram API Guides

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.

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}.

Scraping Instagram comments looks trivial until you notice pages overlapping or comments silently missing. The route has a pagination contract that is easy to get wrong; this post documents the exact protocol behind the media comments endpoint.

Exporting an Instagram follower list is the canonical scraping task — and the one where half-baked implementations lose people silently. This is the exact contract behind the followers endpoint.

Hashtags are Instagram's own taxonomy. Mined properly, a seed word expands into its whole semantic neighborhood — every competitor tag, sized by volume, with the posts to back it. Three endpoints do it.

Comments tell you what people think; likes tell you how many bothered to react at all — and who. The likes endpoint returns the likers of any public post in a single response.

Locations are Instagram's underrated dimension: every geotagged post carries a place id, and every place id is a filter the platform curated itself. For local research — venues, neighborhoods, events — location mining beats keyword search on precision.

Stories are where the daily attention lives — and highlights turn that ephemeral layer into a permanent archive the account curates itself. Both are one call each, and they compose into a pipeline.