Guide to Instagram accounts data

You can perform searches for Instagram creator, business and certain personal accounts by calling the Meta Content Library API client get() method method, with the search/instagram_accounts path.

For personal accounts, only those that have account privacy set to public, and have either a verified badge or a threshold number of followers are included. The threshold number of followers depends on the version of the API:

• Version 5.0 requires 1,000 or more followers
• Versions 3.0 and 4.0 require 25,000 or more followers

This document describes the parameters and shows how to perform basic queries by using this method.

All of the examples in this document are taken from a Researcher Platform use case and assume you have already created a Python or R Jupyter notebook and have created a client object. See Getting started to learn more.

See Data dictionary for detailed information about the fields that are available on an Instagram account node.

Parameters

Sample queries

Search for Instagram accounts by keyword

To search for Instagram accounts that contain a specific keyword use the get() method with the q parameter. See Advanced search guidelines for information about how multiple keyword searches are handled.

library(reticulate)
client <- import("metacontentlibraryapi")$MetaContentLibraryAPIClient

client$set_default_version(client$LATEST_VERSION)

response <-client$get(
                      path = "search/instagram_accounts", 
                      params = list('q' = "cybercrime")
)
jsonlite::fromJSON(response$text, flatten=TRUE) # Display first page

# Fetch next page
if (client$has_next_page(response)) {
    response <- client$query_next_page(response)
    jsonlite::fromJSON(response$text, flatten=TRUE) # Display second page
}

from metacontentlibraryapi import MetaContentLibraryAPIClient as client

client.set_default_version(client.LATEST_VERSION)

response = client.get(
       path="search/instagram_accounts", 
       params={"q":"cybercrime"}
)
display(response.json()) # Display first page

# Fetch next page
if client.has_next_page(response):
    response = client.query_next_page(response)
    display(response.json()) # Display second page

This example would return only 10 results per page. You can use the query_next_page() and has_next_page() to get the next page of 10 results until all the results have been returned. See Search guide for other display and storage options.

Request specific fields

To have the API return only specific fields on any Instagram accounts in the response, use the get() method with the fields parameter and a comma-separated list of fields you want included. If omitted, default fields will be returned. To more easily see columns of data, this example specifies a DataFrame response format (the default response format is JSON).

library(reticulate)
client <- import("metacontentlibraryapi")$MetaContentLibraryAPIClient

client$set_default_version(client$LATEST_VERSION)

response <- client$get(
	path = "search/instagram_accounts", 
	params = list('q'="cybercrime", 'fields'='id,name,biography')
)
jsonlite::fromJSON(response$text, flatten=TRUE) # Display first page

from metacontentlibraryapi import MetaContentLibraryAPIClient as client

client.set_default_version(client.LATEST_VERSION)

response = client.get(
        path="search/instagram_accounts", 
        params={"q":"cybercrime", "fields":"id,name,biography"}
)
display(response.json()) # Display first page

Search for Instagram accounts by account ID

You can search for Instagram accounts using specific account IDs obtained from previous account searches.

To get data on specific Instagram accounts that contain specific keywords or phrases, use get() the account_ids parameter (specifying the list of account IDs you want included). If you omit the q argument, all accounts in the list of IDs are included, not just those with a specific keyword or phrase.

library(reticulate)
client <- import("metacontentlibraryapi")$MetaContentLibraryAPIClient

client$set_default_version(client$LATEST_VERSION)

response <- client$get(
       path = "search/instagram_accounts", 
       params = list("account_ids"=list("315242517956050"))
)
jsonlite::fromJSON(response$text, flatten=TRUE) # Display first page

from metacontentlibraryapi import MetaContentLibraryAPIClient as client

client.set_default_version(client.LATEST_VERSION)

response = client.get(
            path="search/instagram_accounts", 
            params={"account_ids": ["315242517956050"]}
)
display(response.json()) # Display first page

For using Instagram account IDs to search for posts from specific Instagram accounts, see Guide to Instagram posts data.

Learn more

• Getting started
• Search guide
• Data dictionary
• Advanced search guidelines
• Guide to Instagram posts data