Instagram Scraper Webhook in n8n: RapidAPI Post Metrics

Rapidly fetch Instagram post metrics in n8n with a single webhook

This n8n workflow exposes a webhook that accepts an Instagram username, retrieves the account’s recent posts via RapidAPI’s instagram-api1, and returns a clean JSON response with both post-level details and aggregate engagement metrics—ready for dashboards, analytics, or automation.

What this workflow does

• Accepts a POST webhook request containing a JSON body like { "username": "nasa" }.
• Validates and cleans the username (e.g., removes @ or instagram.com URL parts) and adds a scrape timestamp.
• Calls RapidAPI instagram-api1 to fetch the user feed for the provided account.
• Parses key post fields into a structured list, including caption, media URL(s) (image/video), likes, comments, timestamp, permalink, and location.
• Computes summary statistics across the parsed posts (total posts, total likes/comments, and per-post averages).
• Returns a JSON response containing the username, scrape time, summary metrics, and the full array of parsed posts.

Use cases

• Influencer and brand monitoring: regularly pull recent post engagement for a set of Instagram accounts.
• SaaS analytics pipelines: feed post-level metrics into your reporting layer or internal BI tooling.
• Content performance tracking: compare average likes/comments per post over time.
• Automation engineers: trigger downstream workflows when new engagement data is fetched via webhook.

Technical details

• Nodes/steps: set, code, webhook, http request, respond to webhook (plus a sticky note for guidance).
• External integration: RapidAPI instagram-api1 endpoint authenticated with RAPIDAPI_KEY (set as an environment variable in your n8n instance).
• Output: structured webhook JSON with post-level fields and aggregated engagement metrics.

Setup note: create a RapidAPI subscription for instagram-api1, set RAPIDAPI_KEY, activate the workflow, then POST to the production webhook URL.