Instagram has now opened up API access!

Instagram has now opened up  API access… But what does this mean for businesses?

Instagram has announced that it’s opening up its API access to approved third party platforms, which will enable marketers to track and manage their Instagram presence in more ways.

As Instagram:

“While businesses have been using insights to view metrics for their content and overall presence on the Instagram app, they’ll now be able to access these valuable insights in the Instagram API for the first time. This will help businesses keep track of their organic content’s performance more effectively on third party tools outside of the Instagram application.”

Basically, this means that more third party tools will be able to provide in-depth Instagram data and functionality – for example, here’s how third-party app Iconosquare is now able to display Instagram insights data.

In addition to this, the new API access will include comment moderation, so brands will be able to not only respond from their management dashboard, but also hide comments, or turn them off completely.

As noted by Marketing Land, this could especially come in handy for social media monitoring.

“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.”

Of course, you still need to be using an Instagram marketing partner platform – and as a related aside, Instagram has shut down a range of non-approved tools using Instagram access against their terms of service of late, including Instagress and Mass Planner. Those platforms were shut down for facilitating the use of bots and automation, so not specifically linked to the purposes of this announcement, but there can be some confusion between approved and non-approved apps to best facilitate Instagram growth.

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