How do the changes to the Instagram API affect my prize draws and monitoring?

As you know, the changes that Facebook was going to make in the Instagram API, scheduled for June 2018, have become more urgent due to the Cambridge Analytics scandal. Do these changes affect the prize draws and monitoring that you can carry out through our platform? Yes, and we will explain it here in detail. 

You can also check out the changes through the following link: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/04/04/facebook-api-platform-product-changes/

1. Prize draws on Instagram.

1.a) Prize draws and competitions based on followers.

Instagram will no longer provide information about the list of users who follow a certain account. What does this mean? You will no longer be able to hold prize draws among the followers of your profile, and you will not be able to filter by the requirement to be a follower when participating in a direct draw. 

you run a competition or quiz with our Cool Promo or Cool Promo White Label applications and add the option for users to sign up for the Instagram campaign, you cannot ask them to follow your account as a condition of participation.

1.b) Prize draws based on post likes.

Likes-based draws will no longer be available for a specific publication, since from 4 April 2018 the Instagram API does not allow the collection of this data. 

Therefore, you cannot ask your users to "like" one of your posts as a requirement to participate in a prize draw. You can ask them to make a comment. Within the comments, you can ask them to mention one or more users or filter using a particular hashtag. 

2. Monitoring.

2.a) Monitoring a hashtag or geotag on Instagram.

Until now, when you carried out the monitoring of a particular hashtag on Instagram, you could obtain data such as the bio of the users who made publications with that tag, their gender, the hashtag impressions... As of 4 April 2018, you will only be able to obtain certain data, since access to the following is restricted:

• Name, bio, followers (top contributors) and followed by of the users who are using the hashtag.
• Location. 
• Gender.
• Potential scope.
• Potential impressions of the hashtag.

If you have made any hashtag monitoring with a date before 4 April 2018, you can continue to obtain all the previous data, although only photographs prior to this date will be included. However, if you set up monitoring from that date onwards, this data will no longer appear. 

2.b) Monitoring of competitor profiles.

Instagram no longer allows you to collect the latest photos from a profile that you do not manage. Therefore, you will not be able to monitor the profiles of your competitors. In addition, only profiles associated with Instagram Business Accounts can be analysed. 

2.c) Monitoring of followers.

As we have explained before, Instagram no longer allows us to obtain information about the followers of a certain profile. Therefore, you will not be able to obtain detailed information about your followers, such as gender, bio or location.

It is likely that within a few days, and when Facebook allows it, we can once again obtain certain relevant data, such as location and age range and gender. However, we will not be able to know which the most influential followers are. 

3. Instagram searches.

3.a) Cool Tabs public page for Instagram searches.

As you know, in Cool Tabs we have a public page enabled so you can carry out Instagram searches more readily directly from our platform: https://www.cool-tabs.com/instagram

Now, as of 4 April 2018, it is no longer possible to search by user. You can, however, continue searching by hashtag or content. 

We are sorry for the inconvenience that the changes in the Instagram API could cause you when carrying out your prize draws and monitoring. We will keep you up to date about any future changes that may occur and the functionalities that we can recover. 

If you have any questions, you can write to our support team (help@cool-tabs.com) and we will be happy to help you :-)