USE CASE:
Audience size for media companies on Instagram, start to finish
Here is how audience size for media companies on Instagram actually gets done, what it costs each way, and where each way stops working. We are Mamba Labs, we build Apify actors, and Meta Brand Presence Mapper is the one that does this for media companies on Instagram.
What is actually going wrong
On Instagram, media looks like the easy case and is not. Any audience size method for media companies on Instagram has to survive this: Instagram is where consumer brands keep their shop window, so an absent account is itself a finding. What catches people out on media companies on Instagram, audience size included: traffic estimates are the qualifier and they are the least reliable number available. Meta Brand Presence Mapper carries 1 ready made setup for audience size on media companies on Instagram.
Why anyone bothers
The shape of an audience across media companies on Instagram matters more than the total, and a spreadsheet column called followers records only the total.
Traditional Search Tools
- Their own media kit, for media companies on Instagram. Free, self reported, and more specific than any third party estimate.
- The account's own posts, for media companies on Instagram. Free, and engagement per post exposes a bought audience in seconds.
- The platform APIs. Official, accurate and gated. Most now require an app review to read a public follower count, which is weeks of work for one number.
- Social listening suites. Brandwatch, Sprout and the rest do this among many other things. Priced for a brand team, not for a qualification step in a sales list.
- SimilarWeb or a traffic estimator. A different proxy for the same question. Better for whether anyone visits, worse for whether anyone follows.
- Open the profiles. Find the accounts, read the numbers, write them down. Two minutes per brand per network, and completely accurate on the day you do it.
Mamba Labs Apify Actors
These are the actors we built for this job. If yours is not covered here, search from the bar at the top of the page or contact us here and tell us what you need.
- Meta Brand Presence Mapper1 preconfigured task on this page's job.
Preconfigured tasks
A task is one of these actors with the inputs already filled in for a specific version of this job. Open one, swap in your own list, and run it without setting anything up from scratch.