How To Scrape Instagram Posts Data from Public Profiles to Analyze Trends?

People and businesses spend most of their time and money on social media to reach their target audience. Instagram is highly popular, where people interact with posts, reels, ads, and users while helping companies connect with their leads.

With Instagram post data scraping, you can access the granular data required to understand the interests and trends vital for boosting user engagement. It is challenging to extract manually as the data is updated in real-time, and missing a single opportunity is not a risk you can take.

We will share the advantages and complications of collecting data from public Instagram posts to make smarter decisions and develop informed strategies for your success.

Why Scrape Instagram Posts From Public Profiles?

Instagram has billions of active users who share their moments and build a vast collection of insightful data. Businesses, individuals, and researchers want to tap into this post data to explore market gaps and chances to bring potential leads.

Some of the reasons to scrape Instagram post data from public profiles are:

• Social Media Analytics: This will help businesses and competitors analyze their social media performance. They focus on metrics like follower growth, engagement rates, and post reach.
• Market Trends: Businesses must explore their target audience's behavior, preferences, and interests on Instagram. By scraping Instagram posts, profiles, and comments, they can create a more responsive post for their followers.
• Content Personalization: When you scrape Instagram posts from public profiles, you can customize your content to meet specific needs and draw attention to your brands.
• Competition Analysis: Instagram data scraping will help you understand competitors' strategies through their public profiles and post analysis. This will allow you to make a difference and strategically target your potential leads.
• User Engagement: Monitor user behavior on the platform by scraping comments, engagement rates, and post reach. Analyze the data in depth and know your metrics to optimize your marketing plans with data-driven decisions.

How To Scrape Instagram Posts from Public Profiles Using Python?

If required, Instagram scrapers can gather data and save it in .csv format for more straightforward analysis. With the proper process, you can gather data on Instagram public posts, profiles, count of posts, followers, following, email addresses, or accounts.

Let's scrape Instagram post from public data using Python:

Start Installation

pip install instaloader

Scrape User Profiles

Import the instaloader package and create an Instaloader class:

import instaloader

bot = instaloader.Instaloader()
                        

We will use the .from_username() method of the Profile class and pass the bot.context and username of your choice:

profile = instaloader.Profile.from_username(bot.context, 'python_scripts')
                        print(type(profile))

Handling Followers and Followees

Using the instaloader you can retrieve the usernames:

# Retrieve the usernames of all followers
followers = [follower.username for follower in profile.get_followers()]

# Retrieve the usernames of all followees
followees = [followee.username for followee in profile.get_followees()]

Download Posts

Use the instaloader.Hashtag.from_name():

hashtag = instaloader.Hashtag.from_name(bot.context, 'python')

python_posts = hashtag.get_posts()
                        

Use Proxies

Use proxies when scraping Instagram to avoid affecting the performance:

for index, post in enumarate(python_posts, 1):
bot.download_post(post, target=f'{hashtag.name}_{index}')
                        

login = session.post('https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/ajax/', data={'password': passwd, 'username': user}, allow_redirects=True)

proxies={
'http':'YOUR PROXY',
'https':'YOUR PROXY'
}

This will help you to avoid getting banned while exploring multiple accounts from different IP addresses.

How To Handle Instagram Anti-Scraping Measures?

Instagram has high-security measures to secure its data and avoid online threats that compromise user privacy. Here are some methods that will keep you secure from getting blocked temporarily or permanently by scraping Instagram data:

• Headless Browsers: These will render JavaScript, give you a smoother browsing experience, and reduce the chances of getting detected on the target platforms.
• Random User Agents: There are user-agent strings to mimic different users, making it challenging for Instagram to detect the activity.
• Manage Sessions: Choose the web scraper that maintains consistency in user sessions. If not handled, this can lead to blocks on Instagram.
• Rely On Proxies: Using various tools, you can rotate the IP addresses and proxy servers. It will help you distribute requests across multiple IPs, reducing rate limitations and blocking changes.
• Limit Requests: Add intervals between the requests to ensure you browse the target platform naturally and avoid being detected as an automated bot.
• No Peak Hours: When you extract data during peak hours, you are more likely to encounter CAPTCHAs and rate limiting to ensure the target website's smooth performance.
• Follow Robots.txt: This file contains the outline for scraping data on Instagram, and adhering to these rules is essential to avoid consequences.
• Use Data Responsibly: Use the data you scraped from Instagram only for legitimate purposes and avoid unethical practices.

What Are the Use Cases for Instagram Post Scraping from Public Profiles?

Instagram is gaining popularity among other social media channels and boosting brand awareness through intelligent marketing strategies. Let us look at the use cases here:

Influencer Marketing

Businesses use data scraping to find influential users, hashtags, and popular and trending content. This Data is helpful in marketing campaigns and finding influencers to reach their target audience.

Social Media Analytics

With Instagram data, users can easily track engagement metrics, post-performance, user interaction, and follower growth. It will help to work on your social media strategies and marketing methods for better engagement.

Topic Trendspotting

Instagram data scraping helps businesses target competitive keywords and hashtags relevant to their domain. Using the right hashtag will boost the chances of appearing to the target audience and make the brand visible.

Lead Generation

Reaching out to the target audience by following the hashtags in your domain will expand the audience. Research competitors' posts and hashtags they use to reach potential leads by making intelligent decisions.

Customer Support

This data scraping of Instagram allows the brands to collect customer reviews and comments on the posts. Also, with filters in scraping tools, you can quickly narrow down the keywords and hashtags from the data.

Advanced Content Strategy

Social media is an ever-changing landscape, making it difficult for brands to handle at the right time. Instagram analytics will help you find the content that is getting attention and when your audience is active. Understand the variables like images, hashtags, Call-To-Actions, and interaction time to plan your strategies correctly.

Cross-Network Insights

Scraping social media channels will help to monitor the cross-network strategy through centralized data sets. This integrated approach ensures you have informed decisions while making marketing efforts and make a significant impact on the audience.

What Are The Instagram Public Posts Metrics You Must Monitor?

There are dozens of Instagram scraping tools to bring you insights that are challenging if handled manually. Here are some of the key metrics you must look for:

• Region: The number of distinct users who have seen your content, broken down by geographical location, allowing you to identify the areas most engaged with your content.
• User Impression: The total number of times a piece of content is displayed to users. Impressions help gauge how effectively you promote your account, content, campaigns, or ads.
• Brand Mentions: The number of times the brand is mentioned across social media platforms, including direct @-mentions in comments, captions, and Stories. It measures brand visibility and engagement.
• Hashtags: The number of times specific hashtags created for your brand or campaign are used by others. This helps track the effectiveness of campaigns or promotions.
• Most Engaged Hashtags: The top-performing hashtags that generated the highest engagement. These provide insights into the content and interests of your audience.
• Total Followers: The sum of all accounts following your profile, including insights on follower growth, top locations, age ranges, and times of highest activity.
• Content: All posts, Stories, and videos you've shared across your social media platforms.
• Interactions: Actions taken by users on your content, such as likes, shares, saves, comments, or replies.
• Comments: The average number of comments received on each post, highlighting how much your content sparks conversation.
• Saves: The number of times users have bookmarked a post.
• Shares: The number of times a post has been sent to another user.
• Plays: The number of times a video has been played on Instagram, whether automatically or through user interaction.
• Visits: The total count of times users visited your social media profile within a given time frame. This metric helps assess interest in your brand.
• Live Interactions: The total number of comments and shares during an Instagram Live session.
• Stories Views: The number of people who have viewed an Instagram Story, along with other metrics like replies, impressions, and navigation for each slide.
• Saved Posts: The number of times users have saved your posts, indicating the value or interest they find in your content.
• Content Reach: The total number of unique individuals who have viewed a post. It is often mistaken for impressions, though they differ. For example, if you see a post three times, that counts as three impressions but only one reach, as you are a single unique viewer.
• Click-Through-Rate: The percentage of users who see an Instagram ad and click on it, providing insight into the effectiveness of paid content in driving action.
• Video Completion Rate: Percentage of viewers watching videos, including Stories and Reels, from beginning to end.
• Engagement Rate: The percentage of your followers who connect with your content through likes, comments, shares, or saves.
• Follower Growth Rate: The percentage increase in your followers over a specific period compared to the starting number of followers during that timeframe.
• Story Completion Rate: Percentage of users who view an entire Instagram Story without skipping, indicating how engaging your Stories are.
• Accounts Engaged: The count of unique accounts engaged with your content, including demographic information like age, gender, and location.
• Accounts Reached: The count of unique accounts that have viewed content at least once, including demographic data such as top cities, countries, age ranges, and gender.
• Peak Concurrent Viewers: Most viewers watch your live stream simultaneously.
• Audience Demographics: Your followers' characteristics, such as age, gender, and location, provide insights into whether your content reaches your target audience.
• Instagram Ad Analytics: Performance data for Instagram advertising, accessible through tools like Ads Manager, which details campaign performance, demographics, delivery, spending, and cost per result.

End Note

Instagram public post data scraping requires intelligent tools and strategies to gather the desired results and detailed analysis. We have shared some valuable insights to ensure you abide by the terms and conditions of scraping the target platform to avoid any legal consequences for your business.

Scraping Intelligence has experience in the data scraping industry and delivers custom solutions that meet brand demand and expectations. Our experts ensure that we understand the requirements, build the right custom solution to extract the data ethically and provide structured data sets that are easy to analyze.

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About the author

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Zoltan Bettenbuk

Zoltan Bettenbuk is the CTO of ScraperAPI - helping thousands of companies get access to the data they need. He’s a well-known expert in data processing and web scraping. With more than 15 years of experience in software development, product management, and leadership, Zoltan frequently publishes his insights on our blog as well as on Twitter and LinkedIn.