Instagram Graph API: Hashtag Search Launch

Today, we are launching a new Hashtag Search feature for Businesses on Instagram. With this new feature, businesses will still be able to discover content, measure the reach of their marketing campaigns, and understand public sentiment around their brand. However, we will now be limiting the number of unique hashtags that can be pulled by businesses per-week, content per-request and removing “username” from fields returned.

We understand this feature is highly-anticipated given the upcoming deprecation date for Hashtag Search via the Instagram Platform API on December 11, 2018. With this in mind, our team has been working to create an API which enables appropriate business use-cases, while protecting user privacy and safety.

To learn more, please check our changelog, developer documentation, and apply here.

Currently, the new Instagram Graph API features include:

1. Hashtag Search [NEW]: Allows businesses to find public photos and videos that have been tagged with a #hashtag relevant to their Business Account.
2. Insights: Help businesses access and analyze valuable metrics about their Instagram business profile to optimize the performance of organic content on Instagram.
3. Mentions: A subset of Instagram Graph API endpoints and Webhooks that allow you to identify public captions, comments, and media in which your Business Account alias has been tagged or @mentioned.
4. Comment Moderation: Enable businesses to more efficiently interact with their audience through comments under their media on Instagram: reply to comments, delete comments, hide/unhide comments, and disable/enable comments on your Business Account's media object.
5. Business Discovery: Allows you to get basic metadata and metrics for other Instagram Business Accounts.
6. Content Publishing (in Beta): Available through Facebook Marketing Partners and Instagram Partners only. Post an image to Feed with or without a caption.

We also wanted to remind you of upcoming Instagram Platform API deprecations, first announced in January. The following will be deprecated from the Instagram API Platform on December 11, 2018:

• Commenting - to post and delete any comments on a user’s behalf. This includes posting and deleting comments on a user's own media
• Public Content - to read any public profile info and media on a user’s behalf (this includes Hashtag Search and Location information)

After December 11, 2018, the Instagram Platform API will only support the instagram_basic permission. This can be utilized to make the API calls for the following remaining endpoints:

• /users/self - Get information about the owner of the access token
• /users/self/media/recent - Get the most recent media published by the owner of the access token
• /media/media-id/comments - Get a list of recent comments on your media object. This is only supported for media obtained through the /users/self/media/recent endpoint