Instagram is a goldmine for marketers, researchers, and competitive analysts. Follower counts, engagement rates, hashtag reach, post performance, brand mentions — all of it is visible on public profiles and accessible without logging in.
The challenge: Instagram aggressively fights automation. IP blocks, rate limits, and constantly changing DOM structures make DIY scrapers break every few weeks.
What Seek API Instagram workers extract
From a public profile:
- Follower and following count
- Post count
- Bio text and external link
- Recent posts with likes, comments, views
- Average engagement rate
- Top hashtags used
From a specific post:
- Like and comment count
- Caption and hashtags
- Post type (photo/video/reel)
- Timestamp
From a hashtag:
- Recent top posts
- Post count trend
- Associated hashtags
Profile scraping: the basic call
curl -X POST https://api.seek-api.com/v1/workers/instagram-analyzer/jobs \
-H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"username": "natgeo"}'
Result:
{
"username": "natgeo",
"fullName": "National Geographic",
"followers": 284000000,
"following": 172,
"posts": 29847,
"bio": "Experience the world through the eyes of National Geographic photographers.",
"website": "https://www.nationalgeographic.com",
"isVerified": true,
"avgEngagementRate": 0.52,
"recentPosts": [
{
"id": "CxAbc123",
"type": "image",
"likes": 142000,
"comments": 1840,
"caption": "The Milky Way over Patagonia...",
"timestamp": "2026-01-25T19:32:00Z"
}
]
}
Influencer research workflow
Suppose you’re vetting 50 Instagram influencers for a campaign. Manually checking each one takes hours. With async jobs, you submit all 50 at once:
const usernames = ['creator1', 'creator2', /* ...48 more */];
const jobs = await Promise.all(
usernames.map((username) =>
fetch('https://api.seek-api.com/v1/workers/instagram-analyzer/jobs', {
method: 'POST',
headers: { 'X-Api-Key': process.env.SEEK_KEY, 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
body: JSON.stringify({ username }),
}).then((r) => r.json())
)
);
// jobs is an array of { job_uuid, status: 'QUEUED' }
Then poll until all jobs complete, collect the results, and filter by engagement rate, follower tier, and audience match. What used to take a half-day of manual research takes under 5 minutes.
Hashtag monitoring
Use the hashtag worker to track content volume, trending posts, and related hashtags around a keyword:
{
"hashtag": "sustainablefashion",
"totalPosts": 12400000,
"postsLast24h": 38000,
"topPosts": [ /* ... */ ],
"relatedHashtags": ["ethicalfashion", "slowfashion", "ecofashion"]
}
This is useful for content strategy, campaign timing, and competitor monitoring.
Legal and ethical considerations
All Instagram workers on Seek API target public accounts and public posts — content that anyone can view without logging in. Workers don’t access private profiles, DMs, or stories restricted to followers.
Instagram’s Terms of Service restrict automated access to their platform, so you should consult a lawyer for commercial, high-volume deployments. For research, marketing analytics, and reasonable use cases, scraping public data is generally accepted practice.
Pricing
Instagram analysis costs $0.007 per profile. Analyzing 100 influencers costs $0.70. Hashtag monitoring costs $0.005 per query.
For an agency running weekly reports on 500 accounts, that’s $3.50/week in API costs. Compare that to tools like Modash ($1,999/mo), Upfluence ($2,000+/mo), or HypeAuditor ($399/mo) for similar (often less fresh) data.