How to track Instagram competitors

In the Instagram app

A public account's photos and videos are open to anyone on Instagram, and its profile photo, name, username and bio to anyone on or off it. A private account shows its posts only to the followers it approves. [Source 9] On their own posts, owners can hide the like count from everybody else. [Source 10]

Through Instagram's API

Instagram's API has a feature for this, which Meta calls business discovery: an app working for one Instagram professional account can get “basic metadata and metrics about other Instagram professional accounts”. [Source 1] It names the other account by its exact username. [Source 2] Meta's reference lists what comes back:

• For the profile: the bio, the follower count, the number of posts, the username and the website. [Source 3]
• For each post: the caption, the number of comments, the kind of post (a photo, a video or a carousel), the surface it went to, such as the feed or Reels, its link and when it went out. [Source 4]
• The like count, unless the owner hid it, in which case the count is left out of the answer. [Source 1] [Source 4]
• For a Reel, a view count, which Meta says “includes both paid and organic metrics”. [Source 4]

What stays out of reach

• Personal accounts. The API “cannot access Instagram consumer accounts”, Meta's term for accounts that are neither business nor creator accounts. [Source 7]
• Age-gated professional accounts, whose data “will not be returned”. [Source 1]
• Saves and shares, which Meta marks “Not accessible through Business Discovery”. [Source 4]
• Reach and the other insights, which describe the posts of the account asking. [Source 5] A direct read of a post business discovery returned “will fail due to insufficient permissions”. [Source 1]
• Another account's Stories and its follower list: Meta's documentation of business discovery lists no way to read either. [Source 1] [Source 3]

By hand

Open each competitor's profile once a week and write down what you see: the follower count, how many times they posted, and the posts that drew far more likes and comments than the rest. It costs nothing and works from any Instagram account.

What it cannot give you is history you did not write down. A follower count is today's number, so the trend starts the week you begin keeping it, and a busy week is the week it gets skipped.

Through Instagram's API, on your own account

If you write software, you can ask business discovery yourself. You need an Instagram professional account, which is a business or creator account. With Facebook Login that account has to be linked to a Facebook Page, and Meta's reference lists the permissions the request needs: instagram_basic, instagram_manage_insights and pages_read_engagement. [Source 2] Meta's guide says business discovery also works with the Instagram API with Unified Login, [Source 1] which Meta recommends for new integrations and which needs no Page. [Source 6]

An app that serves professional accounts its builder does not own or manage needs Meta's Advanced Access, which “requires App Review and Business Verification”. [Source 6]

With a tool built on that API

A tool built on business discovery does the asking for you, every day, and keeps the history. You connect your own Instagram professional account and name the competitors, and the tool reads them through Instagram's API on that connection. Before you connect one, check that it sends you to sign in with Facebook or Instagram and never asks for your Instagram password.

What Instagram's terms rule out

Instagram's Terms of Use say, in section 4.2:

You can't attempt to create accounts or access or collect information in unauthorized ways. This includes creating accounts or accessing or collecting information in an automated way without our express permission, regardless of whether such automated access or collection is undertaken while logged-in to an Instagram account. [Source 8]

In section 6, Instagram can “refuse to provide or stop providing all or part of the Service to you” if you violate its Terms of Use. [Source 8]

Name what carried it

Before you write a word, say why it worked: how it opened, what it was about, and what it gave people, whether useful information, a story, a laugh or a question to answer.

Write yours from your own material

Take that shape to something only you have: your product, your customers, your opinion, your photos. Write it in your own voice, from a blank page, with their post closed.

Check it against Instagram's bar

Instagram's guidelines give a quick test:

If someone could remove your contribution to your post or reel, and the content would virtually be the same, it probably needs more of you in it. [Source 12]

What never qualifies

Reposting their post, or rewording its caption, falls short of that bar. Instagram names “just adding a border, watermark, subtitles, or a credit in the captions” as too little, [Source 11] and its guidelines say “Simply adding a different caption or superficial elements to third-party content would not qualify as materially edited content.” [Source 12]

The same guidelines add that they “are separate from our intellectual property policies, which do not allow posting content that violates another user’s intellectual property rights”. [Source 12]