Instagram Graph API: Get Followers List & Following (2026)
If you're building an influencer marketing platform, a social analytics dashboard, or any tool that needs Instagram follower data, you've probably asked the same question every developer eventually asks: "Can I get a list of followers and following through the Instagram API?"
The short answer is complicated. The Instagram Graph API gives you follower counts, audience demographic insights, and the ability to look up other business accounts' public metrics — but it does not provide individual follower lists or following lists. That's a deliberate limitation, not a bug.
This guide covers exactly what follower and following data the Instagram Graph API does and doesn't provide, how to access what's available, the endpoints and permissions you need, and how to fill the gaps when the official API falls short.
What Instagram Follower Data the Graph API Actually Provides
Before building anything, you need to understand the boundaries. The Instagram Graph API provides three categories of follower-related data — and deliberately withholds one that most developers want.
What You CAN Get
Your own account's follower count. The /me endpoint returns your authenticated account's followers_count as an integer. This is a real-time snapshot of your total follower count at the moment you make the request.
Your own account's following count. The same endpoint returns follows_count — the number of accounts you follow.
Audience demographics for your own account. If your account has 100+ followers, the Insights API provides aggregated audience data including age range distribution, gender breakdown, and top geographic locations (cities and countries). This data is aggregated — you see percentages and top categories, not individual follower profiles.
Follower growth over time. The Insights API provides historical follower growth data, showing net new followers over specified time periods (daily, weekly, monthly).
Other business accounts' follower counts. The Business Discovery endpoint lets you look up the followers_count, media_count, biography, website, and recent media of any public Instagram Business or Creator account — without requiring that account to authenticate with your app.
What You CANNOT Get
Individual follower lists. The Graph API does not provide a list of accounts that follow you or any other account. You get the count, but not the individual usernames, IDs, or profile information of your followers.
Individual following lists. Similarly, you cannot retrieve a list of accounts that you or any other user follows. Only the count is available.
Private account data. No data is accessible for private Instagram accounts or personal (non-business) accounts through the Graph API.
Follower lists of accounts you don't own. The Business Discovery endpoint returns follower counts for other business accounts, but not their follower lists.
This limitation is by design. Meta restricts follower list access to protect user privacy and prevent mass data harvesting. The old Instagram API (deprecated in 2018) did provide follower list access, but Meta removed this capability specifically to address privacy concerns.
For a broader overview of Instagram's API capabilities beyond follower data, see our guide on what the Instagram API is and how to get started.
Getting Your Own Follower and Following Counts
The most basic follower data request — your own account's counts — is straightforward.
Prerequisites
Your Instagram account must be a Business or Creator account (personal accounts are not supported since the Basic Display API deprecation in December 2024). Your account must be linked to a Facebook Page. You need a Meta Developer app with the Instagram Graph API product added. You need an access token with the instagram_basic permission.
The Endpoint
Send a GET request to the Instagram Graph API's user endpoint with the fields parameter specifying the data you want.
The request URL follows this pattern: GET graph.facebook.com/{ig-user-id}?fields=followers_count,follows_count,media_count,username,biography
The response returns a JSON object containing your followers_count (how many accounts follow you), follows_count (how many accounts you follow), media_count (total posts), username, and biography.
This gives you a point-in-time snapshot. To track changes over time, you need to poll this endpoint periodically and store each snapshot with a timestamp in your database. There are no webhooks for follower count changes — you must build your own polling system.
Using Business Discovery to Get Other Accounts' Follower Counts
The Business Discovery endpoint is one of the most powerful features in the Instagram Graph API. It lets you look up public metrics for any Business or Creator account — even if that account hasn't been authenticated with your app.
How It Works
You send a GET request with the target account's username embedded in the business_discovery field expansion. The request looks like this:
GET graph.facebook.com/{your-ig-user-id}?fields=business_discovery.username({target_username}){id,followers_count,media_count,biography,website,username}
The response includes the target account's followers_count, media_count, biography, website, username, and verified status. You can also expand the media edge to retrieve their recent posts with engagement data.
Use Cases
Competitor monitoring. Track competitor follower counts over time by polling Business Discovery regularly. Calculate their growth rates and compare against your own.
Influencer vetting. Before partnering with a creator, look up their follower count and recent content performance through Business Discovery. This gives you a data point for evaluating their reach.
Market research. Monitor follower counts across multiple accounts in your industry to identify trends and benchmark your growth.
Limitations
Business Discovery only works for Business and Creator accounts. You cannot look up personal accounts. The data returned is limited to public profile fields and recent media — no audience demographics, no follower lists, no private analytics. Rate limits apply — each Business Discovery query counts against your 200 requests per hour per user token limit.
Getting Audience Demographics (Aggregated Follower Insights)
While you can't get individual follower profiles, the Graph API does provide aggregated demographic data about your audience through the Insights API.
Available Demographics
Age and gender breakdown. The follower_demographics metric returns the distribution of your followers by age range and gender. Data is only available for accounts with 100+ followers, and only includes the top 45 demographic groups.
Geographic distribution. The audience_city and audience_country metrics show where your followers are located, broken down by top cities and countries.
Online followers. The online_followers metric shows when your followers are most active on Instagram, broken down by hour. This data is only available for the last 30 days.
Important Caveats
Demographic data is calculated using only followers for whom Instagram has demographic information available. This means totals may be less than your actual follower count. The follower_count and online_followers metrics are not available for accounts with fewer than 100 followers. Data may be delayed by up to 48 hours. If insights data is unavailable, the API returns an empty data set rather than zero.
Tracking Follower Growth Over Time
The Graph API provides the follower_count metric through the Insights endpoint, which shows how your follower count has changed over specified time periods.
The Approach
Request the follower_count metric with a period parameter (day, week, or days_28) and an optional since/until date range. The response returns data points showing your follower count at regular intervals.
For more granular tracking, build a polling system that fetches your current followers_count at regular intervals (daily or hourly) and stores each data point with a timestamp. Over time, this gives you a detailed growth curve that you can analyze for trends, spikes (often correlated with viral content or campaigns), and dips (which may indicate content issues or unfollows).
For a practical guide on building this kind of tracking system, see our article on building an analytics dashboard using the TikTok API — the architecture patterns (polling, storage, processing, visualization) apply equally to Instagram data.
Why the API Doesn't Provide Follower Lists (and What to Do About It)
The official Instagram Graph API's refusal to provide individual follower lists is a deliberate privacy decision by Meta. Here's the rationale and the practical implications for developers.
Meta's Reasoning
Follower lists contain personally identifiable information — usernames, profile pictures, and account details of individual users who chose to follow an account. Providing this data through an API would enable mass data harvesting, create privacy risks for users who didn't consent to being in a third-party database, potentially violate privacy regulations like GDPR, and enable spam, harassment, and unsolicited outreach at scale.
Meta removed follower list access from the Instagram API specifically to address these concerns, and it's unlikely to be restored.
The Impact on Developers
This limitation affects several common use cases. Influencer marketing platforms can't programmatically verify the quality of a creator's follower base (real vs. fake followers). Social CRM tools can't identify which of their customers follow them on Instagram. Competitive analysis tools can't analyze the follower overlap between competing brands. Lead generation tools can't extract potential customers from competitor follower lists.
How to Work Around It
For your own account's audience insights: Use the Insights API's demographic data to understand your audience composition at an aggregate level. While you won't see individual followers, you'll know the age, gender, and location breakdown of your audience.
For influencer vetting: Use Business Discovery to check follower counts and engagement metrics. Calculate engagement rates from public media data to assess follower quality. High follower counts with low engagement rates often indicate fake followers.
For comprehensive follower data: Third-party data providers offer access to follower and following data that the official API doesn't provide. KeyAPI offers Instagram endpoints covering user profiles, posts, Reels, Stories, followers, following, hashtag searches, post comments, and more — all through a single REST API key. KeyAPI also covers TikTok (70+ endpoints), YouTube, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Reddit, and 15+ other platforms, making it the ideal foundation for cross-platform analytics tools and influencer marketing platforms.
Unlike the official API, KeyAPI doesn't require each user to authenticate individually. You can access public data for any Instagram profile, making it suitable for competitor monitoring, influencer discovery, and audience analysis at scale. Start with 100 free API credits at keyapi.ai.
Authentication Setup: Step by Step
If you're building with the official Graph API, here's the complete authentication flow for accessing follower data.
Step 1: Create a Meta Developer Account at developers.facebook.com.
Step 2: Create an App in the Meta Developer Dashboard. Select the "Business" app type.
Step 3: Add the Instagram Graph API product to your app. This is a step many developers miss — without it, Instagram-specific permissions won't be available.
Step 4: Connect your Instagram Business/Creator account to a Facebook Page through Instagram's settings.
Step 5: Configure authentication. Choose Facebook Login for Business (recommended for most use cases). Request these permissions: instagram_basic (required for profile and follower data), instagram_manage_insights (required for audience demographics), pages_show_list, and business_management.
Step 6: Generate access tokens. After authentication, you receive a short-lived token (valid ~1 hour). Exchange it for a long-lived token (valid 60 days). Implement automatic token refresh — long-lived tokens can be refreshed anytime after 24 hours.
Step 7: Submit for App Review. Your app must pass Meta's review process before it can access data from accounts other than your test accounts. Provide a clear privacy policy, detailed permission justifications, and a screencast demonstrating your app's functionality.
Rate Limits and Best Practices
The Instagram Graph API enforces strict rate limits that you need to design around.
200 API calls per hour per user token is the standard limit. If you have 10 Instagram accounts connected, your total capacity is 2,000 requests per hour (200 per account). Each Instagram account has an isolated rate limit pool. All requests count toward the limit, whether they succeed or fail. Pagination counts as separate requests — fetching 5 pages of data uses 5 of your 200 hourly requests. The limit resets on a rolling hourly basis.
Best practices for managing rate limits: Cache follower counts and demographic data — these numbers don't change every second. Batch multiple data requests into single API calls using field expansion. Request only the fields you actually need. Use webhooks where available instead of polling. Implement exponential backoff when you hit 429 errors. Monitor your usage and set alerts before you approach limits.
Building a Follower Analytics System
For teams that need ongoing follower tracking, here's a practical architecture.
Data collection layer. Set up a scheduled polling system that fetches follower counts (your own via /me and competitors via Business Discovery) at regular intervals — daily for most use cases, hourly if you need more granular data. Store each data point with a timestamp.
Storage layer. Use a time-series-aware database schema. Track follower count snapshots for each monitored account over time, audience demographic snapshots (weekly), and media engagement metrics correlated with follower growth.
Processing layer. Calculate derived metrics from raw data: daily/weekly/monthly growth rates, growth velocity (acceleration or deceleration), engagement-to-follower ratios, and content correlation (which posts drove the most follower growth).
Presentation layer. Build dashboards showing follower growth trends over time, demographic composition, competitor benchmarking, and content performance correlation.
For teams managing analytics across both Instagram and TikTok, KeyAPI provides unified access to both platforms (plus 18 more) through a single API — eliminating the need to build separate data pipelines for each platform. For detailed guidance on dashboard architecture, see our TikTok analytics dashboard guide — the same patterns apply to Instagram.
Common Errors and Troubleshooting
Getting empty responses for follower demographics. Audience insights are only available for accounts with 100+ followers. Data for the online_followers metric is limited to the last 30 days. If insights data doesn't exist, the API returns an empty data set, not zero.
Business Discovery returning errors. Make sure the target username is exactly correct (case-sensitive). The target account must be a public Business or Creator account. Personal and private accounts cannot be queried through Business Discovery.
Rate limit errors (429). Implement exponential backoff: wait 1 second, then 2 seconds, then 4 seconds between retries. Cache responses to avoid redundant requests. Spread polling across time rather than bursting.
Token expiration. Long-lived tokens expire after 60 days of non-use. Build proactive refresh logic that renews tokens well before expiration. Monitor token health and alert your team when tokens approach their expiration window.
Using deprecated Basic Display API endpoints. The Basic Display API was permanently shut down on December 4, 2024. If your code references api.instagram.com or Basic Display API endpoints, you must migrate to the Graph API (using graph.facebook.com). There is no backward compatibility.
Final Thoughts
The Instagram Graph API provides useful follower data — counts, growth metrics, and aggregated audience demographics — but deliberately withholds individual follower and following lists to protect user privacy. This is a permanent architectural decision, not a temporary limitation.
For developers building within these constraints, the Business Discovery endpoint and Insights API provide enough data for many use cases: tracking your own audience growth, benchmarking against competitors, and understanding your audience composition.
For use cases that require deeper access — individual follower lists, following data, competitor audience analysis, or cross-platform analytics — third-party platforms like KeyAPI provide the data the official API doesn't cover, across Instagram, TikTok, and 20+ other platforms through a single integration.
Understand the boundaries. Build within them where possible. And use the right tools to fill the gaps where the official API falls short.