Scraper #6: Scrape Instagram Followers from Any Account

Day 6. We're leaving LinkedIn for a bit and heading to Instagram. This might be the most underrated scraper in the series.

Your target audience already follows someone on Instagram. A competitor. A niche influencer. An industry page. Those followers are people who actively chose to see content about your topic - they're pre-qualified by interest.

How to Scrape Instagram Followers in 5 Steps

1. Pick your target account - choose a competitor, influencer, or industry page whose followers match your ideal audience. Accounts with 500–10,000 followers work best (larger accounts take longer but still work).
2. Open the follower list in browser - go to the Instagram profile, click "Followers," and scroll down once to trigger the API call.
3. Copy the API request from DevTools - open your browser's developer tools (F12), go to the Network tab, filter for "friendships" or "followers," find the v1 API request, right-click, and "Copy as fetch."
4. Set up the Needle workflow - create a Google Sheet with columns for Username and Profile URL. Connect the sheet in Needle, paste the fetch request, and configure the output mapping.
5. Run and export - hit run. The workflow handles pagination automatically, iterating through all follower pages. 1,075 followers took about 8 minutes.

Instagram vs LinkedIn: Lead Data Comparison

Instagram follower data is different from LinkedIn data - here's how they compare and when to use each:

5 Best Use Cases for Instagram Follower Data

1. Competitor audience analysis - scrape followers of 3–5 competitors, deduplicate, and find people who follow multiple competitors. These are your highest-intent prospects.
2. Influencer vetting - before paying an influencer $2,000+ for a post, scrape their followers and check if the audience actually matches your target demo.
3. Cross-platform enrichment - export Instagram usernames, then use Scraper #7 (Lead Enrichment) to find their LinkedIn profiles. Turn casual followers into B2B leads.
4. Targeted DM outreach - followers of niche accounts (under 5,000 followers) tend to be highly engaged. A relevant DM to 200 targeted followers can outperform cold email campaigns.
5. Lookalike audience building - upload the scraped follower list to Meta Ads as a custom audience seed. Let the algorithm find similar users at scale.

Which Instagram Accounts to Target

Not all follower lists are equal. Here's what works best:

• Automation/AI tool pages - followers are builders, founders, and early adopters
• Niche industry influencers (1K–10K followers) - smaller audiences are more focused
• Competitor brand accounts - their followers are your potential customers
• Event/conference accounts - attendee overlap with your ICP
• Newsletter/podcast accounts - followers who consume content are often decision-makers

Summary