How I scrape engaged users from Instagram posts for outreach

[Reg]

I was trying to find a better way to get targeted users from Instagram without spending on ads.
Instead of building an audience from scratch, I started pulling users directly from posts that already had engagement.
Here’s the basic workflow I’ve been using:
1. Find the right posts
I usually look at competitors or niche hashtags and pick posts with decent engagement (not viral, just active).
2. Extract users
Mainly focusing on:

• people who liked the post
• people who commented

From testing, commenters are usually way more responsive than random likers.
3. Filter & segment
Not all users are useful. I usually remove:

• obvious bots
• inactive accounts

and keep accounts that look real + niche relevant.
4. Use them for outreach
Depending on the project, I either:

• engage with their content
• DM them
• or move them into a separate funnel

One thing I noticed: newer posts tend to give better results than old ones.
I tried doing this manually at first but it gets messy pretty fast, so I ended up putting together a simple workflow to speed things up.
Curious if anyone else here is doing something similar or has a better way to filter high-quality users?

 

[Ryuzaki]

What kind of conversion rate are you getting on this? What hurdles are you trying to get them over (email sign-up, product purchase, etc)?

I'd imagine automating as much of this as possible would be ideal, with crawling and cataloguing users with your own spider being the worst (but better than manually) as it'll probably get sniffed out eventually. I'm guessing they offer some amount of API access that could be helpful and better. The only better thing would be to go through their ads which you've ruled out.

Regarding filtering users using easily obtainable data, you could collect data like followers, following, age of account, # of posts, anything regarding bio usage, recency of last post, recency of last comment. Basically whatever is available.

With enough scouring of this mess you could probably graph it out get standard deviations and see what the obvious outlying behavior is in terms of stuff like the ratio of the age of account to followers, or following divided by followers, etc. I'd say there would be at least a few metrics like that that would make bot accounts pretty obvious to help remove them from your outreach (unless even that's automated then who cares).

But it's hard to have a quality versus quantity discussion without a ballpark understanding of what your conversion goal is.