How Businesses Can Use the Instagram Graph API
Over the last year, Instagram has started gradually rolling out new features to help businesses manage their organic presence on the platform.
Starting in July, businesses could access to view organic insights and moderate comments through the Instagram Graph API. And two weeks ago, Instagram released new features to the API, allowing businesses to schedule photo posts, view posts they’ve been tagged in, and view other business profiles.
We’ve put together a quick overview of these newest updates, as well as other helpful features from the Instagram’s API.
New Updates
Scheduling Posts
The ability to schedule future posts has been on social media marketers’ wish lists for a long time. Before, you could prepare and save posts in Drafts, but you had to go back to Instagram to publish them manually.
Now, you can schedule posts in Instagram’s API. You can’t access the functionality through the Instagram platform; you have to subscribe to a third-party social media platform like Hootsuite or Sprout Social. The API is available to all Instagram Partners and Facebook Marketing Partners.
Tips for Scheduling Posts
In-the-moment interactions are still essential on Instagram, so you shouldn’t depend completely on scheduling posts. However, it is a helpful way to organize evergreen content, plan recurring themes or features, or make sure you publish consistently during busy periods.
Experiment with scheduling posts at different times, and track the metrics to see what is most successful. Then continue posting Instagram stories, spontaneous posts and comments, keeping engagement as your main goal.
View Tagged Posts
When your business is tagged or @mentioned in comments or captions (but not stories), the API notifies you.
View Business Profiles
You can browse basic metadata and metrics for other business profiles on Instagram.
Other Features
View Organic Insights
You can track engagement metrics related to your business profile, feed posts and stories. According to Instagram, “this will help businesses keep track of their organic content’s performance more effectively on third party tools outside of the Instagram application.”
Moderate Comments
Through the API, you can manage comments on posts: hiding or unhiding, replying, disabling or enabling.
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