How to Monitor Instagram Profiles?
By Emily Fenton
Updated January 4, 2021
Wanting to monitor your favorite Instagram profiles, like your friends', celebrities', local eateries', and politicians' pages?
Maybe it’s a business competitor you’re looking to spy on for content ideas.
Sometimes, the “follow” button just doesn’t do the trick. Easily monitor Instagram profiles with Visualping.
To monitor Instagram profiles, the “follow” button is a common strategy. You’re telling Instagram you like that user’s content and want it to appear on your News Feed.
But “following” an Instagram profile doesn’t ensure you’ll see all their content, or even half of it: Instagram algorithms organize feed according to what it believes you’ll find the most interesting, calculated from the overall content you engage with.
For certain content to appear at the top of your feed, you have to manually look it up and spend time engaging with it. Even then, you would have to be on Instagram every time they post an update to not miss anything new.
When you “follow” a page, it appears on your Instagram profile as one of the pages you’re following. But what if you don’t want the world knowing you’ve followed the page? Maybe it’s a company, political group or celebrity you want to stay up to date with, but without sacrificing your privacy.
Maybe it's your competitor, and you want to monitor their content and user engagement for competitive intelligence. But adding them to your profile would tip them off -- it’ll appear on your profile as one of your followed pages. Oops.
To monitor Instagram profiles without manually looking them up, telling the world about it or promoting your competitors, use Visualping to monitor Instagram profiles for you.
Monitor Instagram Profiles
Visualping is the world’s top website change detection tool. It’s a free service for monitoring web page changes – including social media, like Facebook and Instagram.
Visualping automatically checks web pages for changes. When there’s a change, Visualping sends you an email alert with a screenshot of the highlighted changes.
Visualping allows users to monitor Instagram pages by tracking any visual changes to the profile – posts, followers, photos and engagements, for example. You can monitor both private profiles who’ve approved your follow request, and public profiles.
The Access Site link, at the bottom of the alert, takes you to the monitored Instagram page so you can promptly view the changes within the app.
The View Changes link takes you to your user dashboard, where you can view all your monitors and they’re highlighted changes over time.
On the free plan, you can monitor up to 5 Instagram profiles per day, with a daily check per page. For more profiles and higher frequency monitoring, Visualping offers several affordable freemium plans to choose from.
Numerous major news publications have covered Visualping as a tool to monitor page changes online, including the Wall Street Journal, NBC and Fox News.
Tutorial: How to Monitor Public Instagram Profiles
Setting up your first monitor with Visualping is easy. When setting it up, you’re also registering your account.
To monitor Instagram profiles, copy and paste the URL of the Instagram profile into the search field on Visualping’s homepage. If you have an issue with Instagram URL, we recommend you use Picuki instead, and find the Instagram profile on there.
Click Go, and then customize the settings: the part of the page you want checked, how often you want Visualping to check it, and the type of monitoring (Visual or text).
Visual-compare is the best monitoring mode for Instagram profiles, because it lets you monitor web page pixels. The email alerts you’ll receive will include the screenshot, with the changes highlighted in red.
Next, enter the email address you want Visualping to send the email alerts to.
Lastly, Visualping will send you an email, prompting you to create a password to complete setting up your monitor and registering your account.
And that’s it: Visualping will monitor the Instagram profile for you, sending you email alerts every time there’s a change.
Private Instagram Profiles
Unfortuantely, it is not possible to monitor private Instagram profiles with Visualping.
Conclusion
To monitor Instagram profiles, the “follow” button isn’t enough to catch all their new content. You’ll likely miss much of their new posts, you sacrifice privacy and, if it’s a competitor – that’s free advertising.
Monitor Instagram profiles easily and automatically with Visualping.
Happy Instagram monitoring!
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Emily Fenton
Emily is the Product Marketing Manager at Visualping. She has a degree in English Literature and a Masters in Management. When she’s not researching and writing about all things Visualping, she loves exploring new restaurants, playing guitar and petting her cats