If you are looking for accounts to run ads in, but you are afraid to throw your budget down the drain and fall into the hands of con artists, then you should collect as much information as possible about the potential partner account. Instagram lets you do this directly in the app. The data will also be useful for analyzing competitors.

How to find out information about an Instagram account

In order to view information about another person’s Instagram account, you need to go to the selected profile and click on the three dots in the upper right corner. Next, select “About This Account”. Unfortunately, Instagram allows you to view data only for accounts with a large reach or that advertise on Instagram. The social network positions this policy as a way to combat fraud and spam.

What information is visible about an Instagram account

1. The registration date of the Instagram account

This will indirectly verify the authenticity of the account, since many recently registered profiles are created for spam or fraud.

Take the registration date and the number of followers into account. For example, an account created a week ago is unlikely to have more than 1,000 followers. So, there is a possibility that this account has fake followers.

1. Country

Is displayed based on the actual location. For example, say a user is living in Italy, but what they post has a location tag that shows Moscow. Italy will be listed in the “About This Account” section.

1. Active ads

Previously, in this tab, there was an option to immediately view the account’s active ads in the feed and in stories. But, Instagram has moved this feature to Facebook. The article “How to view competitors’ ads on Instagram” has step-by-step instructions on how to view the ads now.

This information is very useful to have before running your own ads. It’s important to see what kind of visuals, copy and formats competitors use. Most likely they’ve already tested different options to get audience response and use the most successful ones.

1. Previous Instagram usernames

With this information, you can draw conclusions whether the account in front of you is real (taking the registration date into consideration). Instagram has been analyzing account history data since September 2017. If the account’s name was changed, there will be an arrow to the right of “Former Usernames”, click on it to see the history (including dates and nicknames) of changes. Theoretically, with the help of this information, it’s possible to figure out whether the account was bought for followers and subsequently renamed.

Some users also change their nicknames after scandals in order to hide their past. For example, some company we’ll call “N” produced a low-quality product. Customers begin to write negative reviews, and @mention the name of the company. The company simply changed its name on Instagram to hang on to its reputation. This way, the account name @mentioned in the negative reviews became invalid, and connecting it back to the unscrupulous company would now be much more difficult. It’s thanks to the information about previous names that such companies can be exposed.

1. Accounts with common followers

Before, you were able to find accounts in this tab that have a lot of common followers with the account you’re viewing. This information was useful for commercial purposes, such as mutual promotion and displaying ads. For example, with the help of this information, it was possible to replace one blogger with another, maintaining the same audience to which the advertisement had been shown.

Currently, this method is very rarely used because bloggers have caught on and began hiding their “About This Account” page. However, it’s also possible there aren’t any public accounts that have enough common followers with the target account.

So, it’s better to find accounts with a similar target audience through the “Suggested for you” feature. To do this, go to the account you’re interested in and click on the arrow next to the contacts. You will be shown other accounts with a similar audience based on interests.

Conclusion

Instagram is gradually increasing transparency and making more information publicly available, in order to be more attractive to advertisers, who want to face less fraud. But unfortunately, only indirect conclusions can be drawn from this data. That’s why gathering information this way is only the first step. In order to get a more meaningful picture of the account, we recommend running an account verification in the Check module, and paying close attention to follower and engagement dynamics data included in the LiveDunetool set.