Instagram is one of the most popular social media channels with a large user base of over 1 billion monthly active users and high engagement rates, making it a valuable platform for reaching and interacting with potential customers. Brands can use Instagram to showcase their products, tell their brand story, and connect with their audience through features such as posts, stories, and influencer partnerships.

Listen from Instagram

• Instagram Listening, unlike keyword listening (from keywords), is restricted to Hashtags(#) - that is, messages (Posts from the public profile, IGTV posts, Reels) can only be fetched via matched hashtags in queries.

• It means that Instagram Posts (from public profiles), IGTV & Reel mentions can be fetched via Hashtag listening only.

Instagram source capabilities

• Source: Instagram

• Source of data: Meta/ Public API

• Coverage: Public accounts data available as well as paid media data,

  • Scope: All public profiles

• Latency: 5 to 60 mins

• Historical Data

  • For Topic in Listening dashboard: Not available

  • For Quick Search: Available (as data is present in Hulk Repository)

• Backfill support: No

• Engagement stats refresh rate: Due to API limitations - Likes count, comments count is shown what was, at the time of ingestion of data.

• Author/ Profile metadata details:

  • Earned: No

    • Author metadata like Name, Author URL, Bio, Profile Pic, Number of Followers, Author level metrics and Story data are not available and cannot be fetched due to API limitations from Meta

  • Owned: Yes

    • Posts Data, Author Data, Author Metadata, Profile Metrics, Stories, etc. is available for owned IG messages

• AI-enriched fields: Language, Sentiment, Emotions, Word cloud, Topic Cluster, Smart Themes Clustering, Smart Insights

• Message Type

  • Owned: Posts, Stories, Comments, Direct message, Dark posts

  • Earned: Instagram Post

• Media Type

  • Video: Posts containing videos

  • Carousel: Posts containing more than one photo or video, which users can view by swiping left on a post

  • Photo: Picture

  • Status: Only text mentions

  • Reels: Short videos with or without remixing

• Type of Monitoring: #hashtag search, @Business Account Monitoring, @Owned Business Account Monitoring

• Engagement stats refresh: Engagement stats are not refreshed in Instagram posts. It might be updated for existing grabbed posts if the same post is fetched again for some reason. But there is no guarantee that it will happen, even then, the stats update for the first 24 hours only.

Instagram data entities in Social Listening

Types of Listening in Instagram

To fetch data from Instagram

• In order to fetch data from Instagram, you need to create a topic with Instagram as its source. To learn in detail about how to create a topic, refer to – Create a Topic in Topic Creation UI.

• While creating or editing your topic, click the Apply Filters tab, and select Instagram as one of the Social Channels.

• You can also select Source: Instagram from the dashboard/widget filter.

Limitations

• Instagram (including Reels, IGTV) can currently listen to hashtags only. This is due to an API limitation. Up to 30 hashtags are allowed per account in a 7-day period per business account.

• Profile Data (Name, Image), Author level metrics and Story data is not available due to API limitations. (Earned Mentions)

• Backfill not supported

• No location metadata

• No comments are fetched (Earned Mentions)

• Likes count, comments count are ingested at the time of ingestion of post only.

• Reach metric is not supported as follower data is not provided by Meta API for instagram.

• Hashtags can only contain letters, numbers, and underscores (_), no special characters. If any hashtag in the list has a special character it will be discarded or interpreted differently.

Frequently asked questions

General Instagram FAQs

Reels FAQs