Build Your Own Instagram Database

Monitor Friends, Influencers, and Brands using InstaCrawlR Scripts

Social Media Monitoring can be tough, especially when the number of channels, profiles, and posts to keep an eye on grows. In many companies, data collection is a job typically done either by interns or specialized external service providers. Small and Medium-sized Enterprises as well as private individuals, like bloggers and influencers, often need to do it manually by copy & pasting relevant data from social media to Excel sheets.

This is boring.

If you ever had to do some task like that manually, you know how exhausting and uninspiring it can be. That’s why we invented computers as the modern-day slaves.

I am currently working on a academic paper, my Master thesis. For that I needed to create a database of roughly half a Million Instagram posts and 100,000 Instagram profiles. Doing that manually would have meant to tripple my total time at university (which is large enough anyways…). Obviously, that was not an option for plenty of reasons.

Naturally, I thought about automating the task and wrote some R Scripts to do the work for me. And since there are many people out there with a need for automation, I decided to share my databaseBuilder.R Script as part of the growing InstaCrawlR package.