With the recent Instagram listening API updates, one challenge facing brands and agencies looking to leverage Instagram content for social insights is the authorization requirements necessary to monitor their organization’s business channels.
Instagram now restricts social listening platforms to monitoring only business channels. This requires that users authorize their social listening platform to download Instagram data on their behalf.
While understanding the basic permissions/authorizations required to unlock all the great Instagram content available for social analytics is pretty easy to understand; figuring out how to get the required permissions is not always as straightforward.
In many instances, the customer insights team responsible for analyzing social conversations are not Facebook or Instagram page owners, and lack the authorizations required to analyze Instagram consumer insights and track conversation metrics.
Access Levels & Authorizations
Let’s recap from my previous blog article the different levels of Instagram access and authorization. NetBase offers two levels of coverage for accessing Instagram data—one Basic level and two Extended levels. It is important to understand two key concepts around the coverage levels.
The first “must understand” concept is that your account’s access to Instagram data at any level requires authorizations. An authorization gives NetBase permission to access the Instagram API data on your behalf.
To obtain Basic Business Channel Coverage (posts and post data for any owned or non-owned Instagram Business Profile, including competitors, influencers, or any Business Profile), your account must authorize using any Facebook page linked to any Instagram Business Profile. This is easy to do right from within the NetBase console.
If no user in your account has authorized NetBase to download Instagram content, no Instagram channel content will be collected for analysis in your account.
Instagram also limits the number of calls to the new API based to 200 calls per hour per user authorization. The more authorizations you have granted your social listening platform, the more channels we can track and check for updates at higher frequency on your behalf. This applies to all listening platforms. If fewer than two users in your account have authorized access, Instagram data collection latency will correspondingly increase.
To obtain Extended Business Channel Coverage (comment text from your owned Instagram channels), a user must authorize every owned channel you want to track. The authorizing user must have the Analyst role or higher on the Facebook page linked to the owned Instagram Business Profile. After successfully authorizing, a user can add multiple owned channels to their authorization.
New NetBase Instagram Authorization Manager
Here is where things get tricky and how NetBase can help! Many social media analysts and consumer insights professionals simply don’t have the required Instagram channel permissions, so they will need to work with their internal Instagram channel managers to gain the proper authorizations to enable channel monitoring.
Requesting and managing theses Facebook/Instagram authorizations delivers on the following:
- Unlocks valuable social listening data – Each of your branded Instagram pages has lots of great information that you can use for measuring consumer sentiment and engagement as well as insight around campaign effectiveness, influencer identification, brand health, new product ideas and competitive analysis!
- Increases your authorized hashtag tracking – Remember, with the new Instagram API you can only track 30 hashtags per owned business channel. By requesting authorization for each of your branded Instagram pages, you will maximize the available hashtag coverage for your account.
- Reduces the latency of your Instagram listening data – as mentioned above, Instagram limits social listening platforms to 200 API calls per hour for each individual user authorization. This applies to every listening platform. There are no exceptions or special relationships that give one vendor preferential treatment. (If you hear otherwise, beware, transparency is not their strong suit. Yea, I’m talking to you Linkfluence!) The more authorizations you have, the less latency your listening data will experience with business channels and hashtag tracking. Our tool helps minimize that latency .
- And you may have guessed this, but you can track more channels. If you have 100s of channels across many topics available to you, you have access to a rich client pool of data. And to capture it all, you need more authorizations. Our authorization manager will get you sorted out!
The Instagram Authorization Manager is the just first of several tools NetBase will be releasing in our platform to make Instagram listening an even more valuable element in all agencies’ and brands’ strategic marketing toolbox. Stay tuned for some exciting product announcements in the coming weeks!
If Instagram analytics is important to your social listening strategy, contact NetBase for a demo. Let us show you all of the new Instagram capabilities supported *today* to avoid any disruptions in your Instagram coverage tomorrow.
Subscribe to our blog to follow our series of Instagram updates including @mentions, stories, and supporting tools.