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Audience research

How to get any Instagram account's follower list

You want the list of accounts following a public Instagram profile — usually to study a competitor's audience, find creators who already follow your niche, or measure how much two audiences overlap.

One endpoint does it. You pass a handle, you get back profile summaries for that account's followers, plus a cursor to keep going. There is no bulk export and no shortcut: follower lists are read page by page, and a large account is a lot of pages. The numbers below are real, so you can decide before you spend anything.

The endpoint

Instagram

Instagram

Followers / Following

GET /v1/instagram/followers-following

Follower and following lists for an Instagram account, returned as paginated profile summaries.

1 credit per call · $1.50 per 1,000 calls · failed calls never charged

Full endpoint reference

Make the call

Put your key in FASTFETCHZ_KEY. The target below is a real one — it works as written.

curl
curl "https://api.fastfetchz.com/v1/instagram/followers-following?target=natgeo" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FASTFETCHZ_KEY"

What comes back

Trimmed to the fields that matter. The full payload carries more.

200 application/json
{
  "success": true,
  "service": { "platform": "Instagram", "name": "Followers / Following" },
  "credits_charged": 1,
  "data": {
    "followers": [
      {
        "username": "leomessi",
        "full_name": "Leo Messi",
        "is_verified": true,
        "is_private": false,
        "profile_pic_url": "https://cdn.example.com/ig/leomessi.jpg"
      },
      {
        "username": "natgeotravel",
        "full_name": "National Geographic Travel",
        "is_verified": true,
        "is_private": false,
        "profile_pic_url": "https://cdn.example.com/ig/natgeotravel.jpg"
      }
    ]
  },
  "cursor": "QVFEZjE5"
}

Getting more than one page

Each response carries a cursor. Send it back on the next call to get the next page. When the cursor comes back empty or missing, you have reached the end of the list.

Pages must be read in order — you cannot jump to page 400 — so a large follower list is a serial job. Store the cursor with your progress so an interrupted run can resume instead of starting over.

two calls
# Page 1
curl "https://api.fastfetchz.com/v1/instagram/followers-following?target=natgeo" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FASTFETCHZ_KEY"
# -> { "data": { "followers": [ ... ] }, "cursor": "QVFEZjE5" }

# Page 2 — pass the cursor straight back
curl "https://api.fastfetchz.com/v1/instagram/followers-following?target=natgeo&cursor=QVFEZjE5" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $FASTFETCHZ_KEY"

What it costs

100,000 followers ÷ 50 per call = 2,000 calls
2,000 calls × 1 credit = 2,000 credits
$5.80

Priced at the Starter pack rate: 10,000 credits for $29.00. Larger packs cost less per credit.

Be realistic about very large accounts

@natgeo has roughly 280 million followers. At 50 profiles per call that is about 5.6 million calls. Nobody should run that job, and we would rather say so than let you find out at call 40,000.

What works: sample. Ten thousand followers is a statistically useful slice of almost any audience, and it is 200 calls. If you need the full list, cap it at accounts under a few hundred thousand followers, and budget the calls before you start.

What you cannot get

Private accounts return nothing — there is no public follower list to read. Follower entries are lightweight summaries: handle, name, verification and avatar. If you need bio, counts or contact details for each follower, that is a second call per profile to the Instagram Profile endpoint, and it multiplies your cost.

Ordering is Instagram's, not ours, and it is not stable between runs. Treat the list as a set, not a ranking.

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