The global influencer market is set to grow by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.4% from 2019 to 2024. It is expected to become a $22.3 billion industry by 2024. 

Instagram has become the preferred social media channel for influencer marketing. 79% of the brands look for influencers on this platform. This has made Instagram integration necessary for companies catering to the creator economy.

Using Instagram for business can drive brand awareness, boost sales, and build and track audience engagement. It's an excellent way to find customers where they're already spending time. It can also provide valuable audience insights to use with all your marketing plan strategies.

However, connecting to the Instagram API to build products can be complicated. Understanding the data behind influencer marketing campaigns is the first step toward making better decisions and creating campaigns that speak directly to the audience.

The Need for Instagram data: For Creators & Developers

A creator's identity is limited to the silos of Instagram. Creators want to break free from these restrictions and expand their reputation outside these platforms. 

On the other hand, developers of the creator economy require a simple, efficient solution that allows them to verify a large pool of creators across various platforms.

The current practice of confirming identities and metrics of Instagram through screenshots, series of emails, and phone calls are too tedious and time-consuming. Developers need access to the creator’s first-party data directly from Instagram so they don’t need to worry about verification. 

To acquire this data, creators use various techniques.

Read Also: Instagram Influencer Database: How to Find the Best Instagram Creators

The various ways of getting data: Data scraping, Secure login, and API integration

Currently, developers can get data about Instagram creators using one of the three methods:

Data Scraping 

Many third-party agencies use data scraping to provide information about creators’ publicly available data. However, data scraping has many shortcomings:

• Many social media platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram, etc., discourage scraping. The data quality, thus, is irregular and unreliable.
• Data scraping only caters to publicly visible data but not private information such as post impressions, which is an essential metric for many brand engagement/CPM calculations.
• As data scraping doesn’t get information directly from the source, the audience profiles are approximations and vary from one third-party provider to another for the same creator.
• It leaves the onus of creator verification to the influencer marketing platforms. 

Secure Login 

Another way to get the creator’s information is via secure logins. Few companies provide a secure login environment where they take Instagram IDs and passwords from consented creators to get first-party required data.  

However, social media platforms like Instagram are making secure logins more and more difficult with each passing day, making it a non-reliable solution. 

It is also often difficult for the creator to understand what all data points are getting collected, and they have to rely on the trust of the agency.. 

API Integration: 

A secure and consent-driven way of getting creator data is via the API integration route. 

Social media platforms, like Instagram, have provided a layer of APIs with which one can integrate. This method provides you with consent-driven, first-party data of Instagram creators, including post-login/private data.

Data attributes visible only to the creators from Instagram include:

• Views
• Impressions & Reach
• Audience demographics
• Content consumption metrics like video view duration, saves, shares, etc. 
• Direct content URLs that enable you to easily import content into your platforms

However, creating a separate infrastructure for integrating with each platform is a costly and time-consuming process. Moreover, developers will also need to take care of the various consent-related restrictions of these platforms.

To save you from all this hassle, Phyllo provides a single API that provides first-part data of creators from multiple source platforms. 

Recommended Read:

• How To Use Instagram API To Post Photos On Instagram
• How to use Instagram API to pull photos based on hashtag
• Instagram Audience Demographics for Influencer Marketing Platforms

Phyllo: Single API integration with multiple social media platforms

Phyllo is the simplest and most effective way to get creator data. Phyllo provides a single API to integrate with multiple social media platforms. 

Phyllo is an evolved productization of custom social media/creator platform integrations. Rather than thousands of developers building their integrations with YouTube, TikTok, Patreon, Spotify, and Instagrams of the world, Phyllo has made these integrations scalable and trustable. This allows developers of the creator economy to work with a single easy-to-integrate API. 

Phyllo provides the following creator data:

• Profile data
• Content feeds
• Audience demographics
• Insta stories
• Reels
• Content views 

Graph APIs for Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are now a leading format for content creation. However, the engagement metrics are not publicly available and are not provided by third-party scrapers. Instagram Graph APIs covered by Phyllo provide these metrics. This means Phyllo can provide the engagement metrics for Insta Stories.

With first-party Instagram data available in a consent-driven way, companies can now build various exciting products. Here are a few ways companies are using data from Phyllo to build next-gen products and services: 

Business use cases of Instagram Creator Data 

There are several ways in which businesses are using Instagram creator data. Here are a few of them:

Identity Verification

Phyllo provides a consented data pipe for Instagram creators to authenticate and prove their identity. It also asks them to provide access to their data to any developer for validation. Developers can use our REST APIs to retrieve information about a creator's identity, income, and engagement on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, OpenSea, Discord, Shopify, Substack, and many more.

Influencer Marketing

Brands want to invest in creators who are right for them. They also want to ensure that they are dealing with the actual creator and not an impersonator.

Phyllo’s Identity API provides creators’ profile-level information such as their followers, following, subscribers, and other reputation metrics. It also gives audience demographics data (gender, age distribution, location, etc.) to determine how valuable a creator is to the brands. 

Creator Tools

Creators build their platform with creator tools. These platforms become a revenue source for creators via payments from their fans. 

These fans know the creator on Instagram and are coming to this platform to buy their courses/merchandise. These platforms face a significant identity problem because fans have no way of knowing if the platform belongs to the original creator. With Phyllo’s data pipeline, this issue gets addressed.

Fintech

Financial institutions must ensure that the correct creator benefits from their financial services, such as credit cards, insurance, and loans, before offering them to creators.

The standard salary slip or other paperwork is not available to the creators. The only proof they have to show is their number of followers or the amount of engagement they get on their posts. Banks must ensure that the engagement shown is for the creator's own work, not for someone else’s.

Again, Phyllo's data pipe is critical in this case to authenticate the person’s identity.

Web3

Creators are releasing new NFTs and tokens on web3 platforms. Their fans are familiar with these creators from Web2 platforms like Instagram. 
Verifying NFT creators' Web2 reputations and social identities ensure that fans purchase from the artists they love and follow, rather than a fake individual impersonating their favorite creator.

Verifying identity also helps prove NFT ownership to access NFT-based membership DAOs or promotions.

Conclusion and Impact: 

Phyllo is providing access to verified, creator-consented Instagram data. It is the universal API providing you access to data across multiple platforms. With our best-in-class security and compliance practices, and infinitely scalable infrastructure, we do the heavy lifting so you can focus on building your product.

Phyllo Impact: 

Instant Data Access

Instant access to a creator's profile information

50+ Data fields

Access to a wide variety of data fields

Continuous Refresh

Regular updates to the profile information

Up to 80% Savings

Reduce the cost of integration by up to 80%

To learn more about how Phyllo can empower your business with Instagram data, please schedule a call with us.

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