Day 6. We’re leaving LinkedIn for a bit and heading to Instagram.
This might be the most underrated scraper in the series. LinkedIn gets all the attention for B2B lead gen, but Instagram has audiences that LinkedIn doesn’t — especially if you’re in creator economy, DTC, B2C, or if your competitors have active Instagram presences.
The idea:
Your target audience already follows someone on Instagram. A competitor. A niche influencer. An industry page. Those followers are your potential leads.
The workflow:
Go to any Instagram account and click on Followers. Open DevTools, go to the Network tab, and filter for “followers.” Find the API v1 followers request, copy as fetch. Create a Google Sheet, connect it in Needle, paste the fetch, and run.
I tested this on an automation-focused Instagram account with 1,075 followers and scraped all of them. Each row includes the username and profile link.
When this is useful:
Your audience lives on Instagram — or at least part of it does. Automation accounts, AI tool pages, competitor profiles, niche influencers in your space. Scrape their followers, and you have a list of people who are already interested in what you do.
What you can do with these leads:
Follow them and engage with their content. DM them if you have a relevant offer. Or cross-reference with LinkedIn — a lot of people use the same name or username across platforms, which makes it easy to find their professional profiles.
Tomorrow: Scraper #7 — Lead Enrichment. The final piece that ties everything together.
