Instagram Account Research

Use this skill for known Instagram accounts: creator snapshots, competitor profiles, brand account checks, and shortlists worth deeper content analysis.

Apply shared rulebook and user-guidance rules from postplus-shared.

Do Not Use When

• The user has no handle list and wants open-ended creator discovery. Route to

instagram-creator-discovery.

• The user wants post/Reel pattern mining rather than account evaluation. Route

to instagram-content-benchmark.

• The user wants comment language or objections. Route to

instagram-audience-voice.

Collection Key Routing

Route to the matching hosted collection key by task shape:

• profile snapshots for known usernames or profile URLs,
• recent public posts for shortlisted accounts only.

Discover the exact released collection keys and request shapes with postplus research schema --json. Use hosted collection outputs and the workflow below when collection, normalization, or ranking is needed.

Default Workflow

1. Confirm the user has known handles, usernames, or profile URLs.
2. Collect instagram-profiles for the handle list.
3. Decide which accounts deserve recent-post collection from profile results.
4. Collect a small instagram-posts sample for shortlisted accounts only.
5. Normalize profile and post outputs.
6. Rank accounts by audience size, engagement proxy, posting cadence, and

topical relevance.

1. Return a shortlist plus account notes.

Run profile and post collection as one serial queue. Do not start profile and post enrichment in parallel. If a request requires a broad profile pass plus a broad post pass, stop before collection and ask the user to narrow the handle list or research theme.

First-Pass Bounds

• 5-15 usernames.
• 6-12 recent posts per shortlisted account.
• No broad market scraping from this account-research skill.

Good Output

Return an account snapshot table, strongest accounts, likely account type, posting cadence estimate, top recent content patterns, and risks such as weak engagement, inactive posting, or weak topical fit.

Failure Modes

• Stop if the request is open-ended creator discovery.
• Stop on missing handles, unsupported collection keys, missing auth,

unavailable hosted service, or stable network failure.

• Do not invent private backend calls or broad fallback scraping.

Handoff

• Need niche creators from search or content signals -> instagram-creator-discovery.
• Need post/Reel benchmark patterns -> instagram-content-benchmark.
• Need comment-driven pain points -> instagram-audience-voice.
• Ready creator leads -> creator-outreach.

Public Command Boundary

• Choose the smallest matching command or workflow from the user input and run

it directly.

• Readiness diagnostics: postplus doctor --skill instagram-account-research.
• If an owned CLI or script command fails, report the exact error and stop. Do

not bypass the failure with metadata-only answers, readiness probing, local payload rewrites, fallback providers, or unpublished tools.

• Use postplus research schema --collection-key <collectionKey> --json only when constructing or repairing an unknown request shape.
• Hosted collection runs through the shared research collect verb (owned by instagram-tools), attributing the run to this skill: postplus research collect <collectionKey> --skill instagram-account-research --request <input.json> --output <result.json> (input = the collection parameters).
• Resume a pending collection: postplus research collect --run-handle <runHandle> --output <result.json>.
• Keep the first pass bounded; expand only after inspecting the first result.
• If the CLI returns a quote-confirmation challenge, run postplus quote confirm --json --challenge-file <challenge.json> and retry with the returned token.