Extract Instagram Followers
If you need to scrape Instagram followers, you’re in for an up-hill battle as there is no public Instagram API to get followers and Instagram is notorious for suing companies who provide this as a service and banning individuals who try this via automated scraping means.
But feat not, as we have a 100% legal & undetectable way to extract the Instagram followers list from any public Instagram account or private account you have access to using a little-known technique involving HAR files. This approach will also work to export following lists for any account as well.
You’ll be able to safely export Instagram data into Excel or Google Sheets using any logged-in Instagram account without ever being detected, as the approach we outline below relies on a passive recording of your web traffic as you use Instagram normally.
Check out the steps below or watch the above video (still works in 2024) for a step-by-step demonstration on how to scrape the followers list (or following list) of any Instagram account.
1. Scroll Through Followers
To start scraping Instagram followers, simply visit the Instagram profile you want to scrape the followers of in your web browser. Just navigate there by username, e.g. https://www.instagram.com/therock/ or type in site:instagram.com with a search query into Google to jump to the profile.
On your web browser (we’ll assume you’re using Google Chrome, but these instructions should be similar for any browser), right click anywhere on the page and hit Inspect to open up developer tools (this will allow you to record your web traffic with the follower list). You can then click on the “Network” tab to see your web traffic with the data in it.
Now click on the link that shows the follower count and scroll through the list of followers. This will load that data into your web browser as you record it now that developer tools are open.
2. Export a HAR File
Once you’re done scrolling, look for a download arrow in your browser’s developer tools (Network Tab) that’s labeled something along the lines of “Export HAR…” Click this and save the HAR file somewhere you can access quickly, like your Desktop:
Now that we have the data inside this large file, the trick is to get the data out of this file. For this, we suggest using our HAR File Web Scraper where you can upload the file here, and the software will parse everything out for you and group together all the different requests with the follower list in it:
You’ll then want to click the “Parse Group” button where you see a large group of requests under the graphql heading - these will be recorded API responses with the follower list in it.
3. Download Instagram Followers
Once the parse finishes, you can click download a combined CSV file with the followers in it:
You can see that the HAR File Scraper combined all of the individual requests into a single list of 158 items that you can now download as a single CSV file. This will allow you to export Instagram followers to Excel via CSV file, simply open Excel and import the CSV file of the followers list on Instagram.
Be sure to import it as a Unicode file into Excel so you properly see all of the emojis and special characters commonly used on Instagram.
Legal Concerns
Since this scraping occurs on a recording of your Instagram web traffic (which you captured while obeying the Instagram Terms of Service by just browsing around) instead of the actual Instagram product or service, their Terms of Service cannot apply to extracting data out of your own web traffic history.
Republishing
However, since this extracted follower list data contains personally identifiable information, you need to be extremely careful in what you do with it and how you process it. If you’re just using it for private and internal research or marketing, that’s probably fine. The legal issues arise when you attempt to re-publish this data elsewhere without the consent of the individuals whose data you scraped.
Emails & Contact Details
You will only be able to obtain the list of usernames using this approach, and not any contact details like email address. You will also be cut off after however many followers Instagram will show on its webpage. For some large accounts, this can be after a few tens of thousands, but is pretty random so you will only be able to get the complete follower list of smaller accounts.
While you used to be able to easily scrape Instagram followers emails, this is no longer the case and extremely risky to attempt to do now (you’ll face your Instagram account getting banned). This is because the IG email and phone numbers (for business accounts) used to be publicly accessible without needing to be logged in to Instagram. Now you need to be an authenticated user to extract emails from Instagram, with each account being limited to a small number of profiles they can view.
Illegal 3rd Party Tools
Every few months you’ll find new IG follower export tools pop up (as older ones get shut down due to legal violations) that offer email scrapers as Chrome extensions or similar tools to scrape Instagram posts.
However, these are very risky to add to Chrome, as they have many unwanted built-in features that can automatically take control of your browser while logged into Instagram and perform automated behavior that will get your account banned.
So please do not attempt to use an email extractor, as it’s likely to get your account banned. Instead, consider doing smaller, more targeted, outreach on Instagram if you must. You’ll likely get better results with 10 manual and thoughtful outreach attempts than trying to spam a list of emails unsolicited content.