A Foolproof Guide to How to Get Instagram Data

It’s a fact that data is vital for businesses to make more successful decisions, analyze the current state of the market, build forecasts, learn the audience, and so on. It’s where the data from social media is more than just useful. These are huge amounts of data, and there are special technologies to collect and process it. If you are still wondering about “how to get Instagram data,” we will detail different ways of collecting information and their benefits.

Before we jump to how to get Instagram data, let's define why it is crucial to do that for any company and why such information helps all types of businesses.
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The main advantages of the data scraping process for businesses are the following:

• Analyze the product based on comments, reviews, and other posts with people's opinions.
• Collect a piece of large-scale information for data-driven decisions.
• Obtain data on user profiles to study the target audience, market, or competitors.
• Understand the desires of potential customers and adapt the product to their requirements.
• Get valuable information that will be useful for developing various Antifraud systems.
• Research the industry and competitive intelligence to make a selling offer unique and relevant.
• Track the trends and gather valuable information for adjusting marketing efforts and improving the product/service itself.
• Monitor the reputation of the company and its rank among others.
• Obtain data about the “work” of the product and what points prevent it from being more relevant.
• Identify opportunities for collaboration (who are the thought influencers in the analyzed area of business).

So, companies can track the mention of their brands in reviews and comments to eliminate the weaknesses that prevent the business from becoming more productive. Collecting data on the Instagram audience on current trends and topics (taking into account information about influencers by tracking their content) is necessary to optimize a product and/or marketing campaign to attract more potential customers.

Use Case: Fashion Retailer Boosting Marketing with Instagram Data

A fashion retailer, let’s name it “F-Apparel,” is an Instagram-based business that needed to improve its marketing efforts and strategy. That’s why, the company required deeper data and insights for further analytics. By using a data scraper, F-Apparel was able to collect:

• Public insights from influencer accounts, helping the marketing team identify key fashion influencers and trends followed by their target demographic.
• Hashtag analysis to see what terms were trending among their target audience to fine-tune the product descriptions and social posts for better visibility.
• Engagement metrics (Likes, Comments, and Post reach) for their content and competitor posts to refine its marketing strategy based on successful campaigns.

All that lead to F-Apparel managed to increase engagement rate and boost online sales.

How to Get Instagram Data: Tools to Use

When knowing why, it is high time to find out how to get data from Instagram. Today, there are many ways to collect valuable insights from Instagram and other social media. Each of them has its advantages and disadvantages. Let's look at the most popular methods:

• Web scraping algorithm. This method is useful even if the page's HTML code is changed. You can use the algorithm on all sites with a repetitive HTML structure. Scraper functions using textual structuring of words in HTML code, where the engine recognizes words or variable names. The principle of the algorithm is that the classification of the words, surrounding the search data, is performed on the assumption that the future HTML code of the site will be similar to the current HTML. It ensures reliable scraping.
• Web scraper. It is the most simplified way to extract web data. Specify the parameters and click on the necessary elements. You don't need coding knowledge here. You can navigate through all sections of the site (categories, pagination, subcategories, etc.). The main advantages are full Javascript execution, waiting for requests (Ajax), a modular selector system, and scrolling down the page. The system allows the creation of maps for different requests and adapting the extraction of information to different website structures. You could extract data in XLSX, CSV, and JSON formats; scrapers are managed via API.
• API-based solutions. It is the fastest and easiest method if you look into how to get data from Instagram in detail. Various sites, such as Instagram and others, offer an API as a service with a high-level interface so that you can directly restore data from back-end databases or repositories. We may say that the API is a set of definite specifications, such as HTTP requests with the designation of the response messages construction. It usually could be done in XML or JSON formats.

There are 3 ways to extract data using the API:

• Open API is a turnkey solution for extracting information, but there is a downside. Only the company provides technical support, customization, and maintenance services.
• ‍The Official Instagram API is a common choice, but the disadvantage here can be the price  and no feature set customisation available.‍
• Third-party APIs are complete solutions with customization, technical support, and maintenance assistance.

The third option is the most convenient for companies that want to know the opinion about their products, improve services, make the marketing strategy more efficient, and so on. Data365 Social Media API can also ill be helpful for developing business dashboards, tracking KPIs in social networks, analyzing mood and experience, and getting different public data about interacting with customers. For more information, contact us.

Make It Right: Legality and Privacy Concerns

Different solutions may offer insights and data from social media, there is one important thing to note. If the processor collects personal data from the user account without his/her consent, that's a breach of privacy laws, including the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and that's just not allowed.

The personal data being protected by Instagram’s terms of service give us the right to only collect or get publicly available data when ever we want to scrape or any other data collection methodology. Such, the social media platform implements rate limiting and the detection algorithms in strict in order not to be defrauded, otherwise, violators can get their accounts banned, IP blocked and face legal consequences under laws of data protection.

Be sure to use a tool which complies with Instagram’s policy and with privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and others. If you fail to comply, your account can be suspended, you can be fined or sued.

So, API is perfect for collecting data on social networks, with Instagram in particular. Here are more details on what kind of data to obtain, how to find Instagram data, and how to get it with API to show all the benefits of using such a solution.

What Kind of Public Data Can Be Obtained?

By using API solutions, businesses can get publicly available information from profiles, posts, comments, and so on.
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Instagram search: 

• Search for posts by specified parameters: hashtags or locations. 
• Search for posts for any period of time. 

Instagram profiles: 

• Profile language, account photo, business category. 
• ID, username, biography.
• The number of posts.
• A detailed list and content of the latest posts.
• Get such types of public data as Stories, Reels, Highlights, etc. for a particular profile.

Instagram posts: 

• Owner ID & location ID. 
• Content in posts: texts, languages, list of hashtags, and tagged users.
• Engagement info ("likes" count, video views count, comments count). 
• Download comments (it could be selected on a specific post) and answers to them, and receive info such as owner ID, text, and "likes" count. 
• URLs of attachments (videos, images).

Instagram comments and replies:

• Get the target comment's internal Instagram ID.
• In case you need to get all the comments and replies, you can get the data by adding the specific parameter to the task for updating post data.

How to Get Data from Instagram?

You can find the query parameters to configure in the  documentation appiled to the solution chosen. Namely, whether you want to get solely profile information, or you are also interested in getting some recent posts, for instance, within a specific data frame, or you need reels, stories, comments, followers, etc.

How to Find Instagram Data?

Let's understand how to find Instagram data using an API solution. Apply the ability to search posts by location and hashtags. For this feature to be accessible, you should get a list of hashtags and location IDs. As a result, you have a detailed list of the latest posts with the given parameters. But that's not all, third-party APIs allow you to receive public data which can later be used for in-depth analysis and building an effective marketing strategy:

• User biography with ID, name, photo, and business category.
• The number of posts.
• Fetch-tagged posts.
• The details in the content of the post (language, text, and also a list of hashtags).
• A maximum number of posts to fetch.
• The number of likes, video views, and comments.
• Comments on a specific post (replies to them).

Data365 API is designed to get a clear idea of what people think about the brand or product. It is a real-time information analysis that collects data from reviews, posts, and opinions on specific parameters. The advantage of the Data365 tool is that you can collect data by location, hashtag, and other requests (including language settings). Here are some more benefits of using the Data365 API:

• 14-day free trial period with any technical support provided.
• Support and help are provided when any issues occur.
• Full compliance with privacy regulations (GDPR).
• Live help (assistance) with setup, customization, and integration.
• Get access to 5 of the most popular social networks from one vendor.
• Help in finding the best solution with the opportunity to add customized options.
• A complex product that is simple to use. All the necessary documentation to work with the API is provided.
• Help in setting up the correct parameters of the queries, and so on.

With Data365, you can create various tasks for automatic or one-time data updates. In the first one, you can set a specific time interval; the second option allows you to cancel information monitoring after the specified date. For more details, please, get in touch with the Data365 experts.

Though the Data365 API capabilities are impressive, there are some limitations to consider. Here are some of them for instance:

• The number of requests can’t exceed 100 requests per second.
• The size of a queue of one type should not exceed 50,000 tasks. If exceeded, the oldest tasks are deleted.

However, you are free to discuss all the nuances and aspects with a team so that Data365 experts help you set the best settings for your project. Unlock valuable Instagram data using our strategies. For additional insights, explore our posts on Instagram scraping tools and the Instagram Graph API.

You have learned more about how to get Instagram data, why such information would be useful, and what tools can be used for the purpose. It is needed for listening to social networks and discovering influencers, monitoring the market, tracking trends, changing marketing strategy on time, improving the products, and so on.
Data365 Social Media API is also the perfect tool to achieve set objectives and scale business. Contact our experts — sales or customer support — at any time convenient for you to get more information about our API and advice on how to find social media data.