Instagram Profile Scraper Pro

The Actor runs five separate Instagram discovery methods behind a single scraperType selector: expanding a seed account's network of related accounts, enriching a specific list of accounts, exporting an account's followers or following, searching for accounts by keyword, and pulling the likers and commenters of a post. Any mode that returns account records can additionally attach business contact fields and a computed engagement quality score, so a single run can produce a list of leads rather than a plain account list.

Each mode uses a different subset of the input fields; a field not relevant to the selected mode is simply ignored. The sections below document each mode's own inputs and outputs before covering the shared enrichment options.

Discovery modes

scraperType	What it does	Primary input
similarUsers	Expands one or more seed accounts into Instagram's own suggested-accounts set, optionally chained outward across up to 5 levels	username
userInfo	Resolves a specific list of usernames to profile records	username
followersFollowing	Exports an account's followers or following list	username, type
searchUsers	Searches Instagram for accounts matching a keyword	keyword
mediaInfo	Fetches a post's full media details, optionally with its comments and likers	codes

Network expansion (similarUsers)

Follows the same suggested-accounts chaining as this project's dedicated related-accounts Actor: chainDepth (capped at 5) controls how many levels outward the traversal follows, maxItemPerLevel bounds branching per level, and exportGraph interleaves _type: "graph_edge" rows describing the discovery path alongside the account records.

{
  "username": ["nasa"],
  "scraperType": "similarUsers",
  "chainDepth": 2,
  "maxItemPerLevel": 5
}

Specific accounts (userInfo)

Resolves each username in username to one profile record, without any discovery step. fullProfileDetails extends the record with post previews, media count, and business fields.

Followers/following (followersFollowing)

type selects followers or followings; resumeCursor continues a large export from a previously logged cursor rather than restarting it.

Keyword search (searchUsers)

keyword searches Instagram's own account search and returns ranked hits (position records the rank). addonProfile swaps each hit for its full public profile.

Post engagement (mediaInfo)

codes accepts post/reel shortcodes (not numeric media IDs). addonComments and addonLikes each attach their respective lists as nested comments/likes objects on the media record; commentsSortType orders the attached comments.

Shared enrichment

Business contacts

fullProfileDetails (Network Expansion, Specific Accounts, Followers/Following) and addonProfile (Keyword Search) each extend a profile record with is_business_account, business_category_name, business_email, business_phone_number, business_contact_method, and business_address_json — public fields the account has chosen to publish. A field is null when the account has not published it; nothing is inferred or looked up elsewhere.

A minority of professional accounts currently fail on Instagram's own full-profile source and fall back to a reduced profile; those records carry is_partial: true and partial_reason: "upstream_schema_error", and their business fields are absent rather than genuinely empty.

Engagement metrics

computeEngagementMetrics samples an account's most recent posts (up to 12) and attaches:

Field	Meaning
avg_likes, avg_comments	Mean across the sampled posts
posts_per_month	Estimated from the spread between the newest and oldest sampled timestamps; null when fewer than two posts were sampled
avg_views	Mean play count across sampled video/reel posts only; null if none of the sampled posts were video
views_follower_ratio, engagement_rate	The above relative to follower count; null when follower count is 0
quality_score	A single 0-100 figure combining the three signals above, for sorting accounts without comparing five separate columns
metrics_sample_size	How many posts the figures were computed from

quality_score weights engagement rate highest (60% of the score, or 50% when view data is available), posting consistency next, and reach from views_follower_ratio last when present. Always check metrics_sample_size before trusting a score built from one or two posts.

This applies only to account-returning modes (Network Expansion, Specific Accounts, Followers/Following, Keyword Search); it has no effect on Post Engagement, since that mode returns a media record rather than an account.

Frequently asked questions

Why does codes say shortcode and not media ID? Post Engagement's underlying lookup requires the shortcode form (the string in a post's URL, e.g. DZpQwxqimz2), not the numeric media ID. This project's other post-lookup Actor accepts both; this mode does not.

Why are avg_views and views_follower_ratio null for an account with plenty of posts? Both are computed only from video/reel posts in the sample. An account whose recent posts are all photos has no view data to average, so the fields are null rather than zero.

Why did computeEngagementMetrics charge for an account that returned no metrics? The sample fetch (up to 12 recent posts) is a request against the account regardless of what it finds; an account with zero public posts still costs that request even though no metrics can be computed from an empty sample.

Does Keyword Search's addonProfile cost the same as fullProfileDetails on the other modes? Yes — both fetch the same full public profile per account and bill under the same event.

Why did a Network Expansion run with chainDepth at 4 return far more accounts than expected? Expansion is multiplicative, not additive: each level multiplies by maxItemPerLevel, so depth 4 at the default of 5 reaches 625 accounts from a single seed before deduplication. Lowering maxItemPerLevel narrows each level while preserving reach; lowering chainDepth cuts levels outright.

Related Actors

Actor	Purpose
Instagram Related Users Scraper	Network expansion alone, with the discovery graph as its primary output
Instagram User Info Scraper	Specific-account profile lookups alone
Instagram Followers & Followings Scraper	Followers/following export alone
Instagram Post Scraper	Post details, comments, and oEmbed metadata by shortcode or URL