On April 4th, without prior notice, Facebook disabled access to some data in both the Facebook and Instagram APIs. This change is a major challenge for many tools that are used to manage profiles and analyze their stats. Fortunately, the restrictions put in place don’t affect Sotrender’s users much.
What are the changes affecting Instagram as of now?
- Currently, new profiles cannot be added to Sotrender.
- For profiles added before the changes, the data is available until April 4th at approximately 8 p.m. CEST (GMT +2).
- Newer data from the profiles already in our database are not being downloaded.
What can Sotrender’s users expect?
- We will restore the ability to download data for your own Instagram profiles. In order to do this, you will need to re-authorize each of the profiles you own (have admin privileges for). When the authorization is re-enabled the data download will resume automatically.
- Integration with the Instagram API
- We’ve already completed work on the new API and will be deploying the update as of next week.
- In accordance with the protocols from the new API, it will not be possible to add non-business profiles from Instagram to Sotrender or any other analytics tools from now on.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that we still have the historical data from before this unexpected update which will be available regardless.
Some restrictions will also affect the usage of the Facebook API. For Sotrender, however, we don’t expect to have any problems in accessing our core data. The only major change is that to add profiles, the exact URL (link) of the Facebook page will be needed rather than just the name.
The challenges mentioned affect the majority of analytics applications that access the Instagram and Facebook APIs. In Sotrender, integration with the new Instagram API started two months ago. Some of our clients were involved in this process by participating in detailed interviews about their data and analytics needs. Thanks to these interviews, these updates will be released very shortly and many new features to be introduced such as Instagram Insights statistics as well as Stories functionalities which are quite long awaited!
In the meantime, we thank you for your patience with the changes that Facebook and Sotrender are going through due to the increased emphasis on the privacy of social network users in light of recent events.
Join us today (April 4th) at 6 p.m. CEST (GMT +2) for a livestream broadcast with our CEO Jan Zając who will be talking about the recent changes introduced by Facebook, their effects on the operation of platforms such as Facebook and the level of access that third parties can obtain from them. This broadcast will be in Polish.
Marta Bongilaj
Irina Weber
Vikas Kalwani
