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How to monitor Instagram using Channels
How to monitor Instagram using Channels

How to track Instagram posts from your competitors or thought leaders

Andrew avatar
Written by Andrew
Updated over a week ago

Why monitor Instagram?

Normally, to collect Instagram mentions in your topic, posts containing a brand mention must include a hashtag. But not all users put hashtags in their posts. To monitor these kinds of posts, you can use our Channel feature. Using this tool, you'll be able to collect mentions from specific Instagram accounts independently of your topic query - such as comments on your own profile, posts from competitor accounts, or influencers and thought leaders.

Which Instagram accounts can be included as channels?

Owned & Operated Business Pages: post feed with comments from your own brand accounts — https://www.instagram.com/youscan.io/

Owned & Operated Business Pages: post feed from the Tagged section of your brand's account — https://www.instagram.com/youscan.io/tagged/

You will be able to collect:

  • Posts in which the page was tagged on media (photo, video, or any media on the album/carousel)

  • Posts in which your page was mentioned in a caption (available in real-time only)

  • Comments for the last/top 100 posts in which your page was simultaneously tagged on media AND mentioned in the caption

  • Comments in which your page was mentioned directly in the text of the comment (available in real-time only)

Owned & Operated Business Pages: stories from pages you manage —https://www.instagram.com/youscan.io/

☝️ Which stories will not be collected:

  • reposts of stories or other users' posts

  • stories created when a user reshares a story from the archive

  • Live Video stories

Post feed from Business or Creator accounts: posts (including reels) from any business account, such as competitors or thought leaders in your field.

☝️ In order to enable Channels, your Instagram profile needs to be authorized.


What kind of authorization do I need for different types of channels?

If you wish to monitor everything from a specific account, including comments, tagged posts, and stories, authorize that account with YouScan. To do so, YouScan needs access to manage the account. Learn how to add authorization for social media accounts here.

To monitor posts from a specific account, you can authorize any Business or Creator account. This can be a company account or a professional profile of one of your team members. This type of authorization does not need access to the account you link. This method is suitable for monitoring of posts of your competitors or bloggers. Only posts from your linked accounts will be collected into the monitoring topic.

☝ Authorization takes place through the Facebook Business Page tied to your Instagram account.

How are posts collected?

Once the channel has been added, all data from the past month is collected by default. If you'd like to collect older information, set a custom time period or select your desired collection start date (any time within the past 12 months).

From this point on, all mentions from linked channels will be collected automatically.

Creating a channel

1. Follow the instructions to authorize your Facebook Page;

2. Navigate to the Settings of the topic in which you'd like to create this channel;

3. In the right-hand menu, select Channels;

4. Click "Add channel";

5. Paste a link to your channel into the pop-up window and click Enter;

6. Select your desired collection period next to the channel;

7. Click the + button to add the channel.

💡 For the system to run smoothly, you should limit your channels to 200 per 1 topic


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