Instagram starts sharing analytics for brands’ organic posts, Stories through API — but there’s a catch

If a brand wants to know how many people it reached with its organic post on Instagram or how many impressions its Story received, it has had to open Instagram’s app to access those stats instead of accessing them through a social marketing dashboard. No longer, though; now that brand will be able to use Facebook to log in to that dashboard, and more options are on the way.

On Monday, Instagram started sharing analytics for brands’ organic posts and Stories through the Instagram Platform API, so that brands can pull up these stats within the marketing dashboards they use to manage and monitor their various social accounts.

Instagram has been testing the features with marketing technology companies like Falcon.io and is now opening it up to all members of Facebook’s and Instagram’s Marketing Partners program. And sometime in the coming months, individual developers will also be able to access these features.

To be clear, Instagram isn’t giving brands any information that they didn’t already have access to. Any brand or individual that has converted their account to a business profile — Instagram’s version of Facebook’s Pages — has been able to pull up stats like organic posts’ reach, Stories’ impression counts and followers’ demographic breakdowns through the app’s Insights tab. But now those stats can be automatically plugged into social marketing dashboards.

There are a couple of requirements that must be met before these stats can be accessed through the API, though. First, brands must have converted their accounts to a business profile. Second, brands must use Facebook Login to sign in to the dashboards provided by Falcon.io or any other marketing technology firm that plugs into Instagram’s API.

“The new API is built on the same stack as the Facebook Graph API. Because of this, businesses will need to use Facebook Login to access the new features. Businesses still have the option to use the current Instagram API, though insights will not be surfaced through it,” according to an Instagram spokesperson.

In addition to making brands’ organic post insights available through the API, Instagram will also now let brands use the API to moderate comments on their posts, such as by hiding individual comments or turning comments on or off for individual posts.

For example, a brand could configure their social marketing management software to keep an eye out for comments with certain keywords — or have every comment sent through a tool like IBM Watson’s text analyzers — and automatically hide comments considered offensive or toggle off comments on posts whose comment threads are overwhelmed with spam.

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