About the Followers metrics in Instagram Insights

Instagram’s follower metrics have some limits informed by Facebook’s API:

• The metrics follower_count, online_followers and all metrics audience_* are not available for Instagram users with less than 100 followers.
• Metric insights data online_followers are only available for the last 30 days.
• If the insights data requested does not exist or is unavailable, the API will return an empty set for the individual metrics instead of 0.
• For demographic metrics, only the 45 best-performing results will be returned (for example, in the case of audience_cityup to 45 cities with the highest numbers of followers can be returned).
• Only viewers about whom we have demographic data will be used in the calculation of metrics of this type.
• The sum of the demographic metric values may result in a lower value than the follower count (see previous item).
• The metrics audience_* are not compatible with the interval parameters since e until.
• There can be up to a 48-hour delay in the data used to calculate metrics.

We’ve also observed in user extracts that queries made between 0:00 and 05:00 on Instagram Insights tend to come up empty, so we recommend leaving schedules for the daily format at other times during the day.