Before you buy

What you need

1. An Instagram Business or Creator account. A personal Instagram account cannot be connected at all. Meta only exposes the research and Insights data Socialens is built on to professional accounts. Switching is free and takes about a minute in the Instagram app.
2. That Instagram account linked to a Facebook Page. This is the part people miss. A professional Instagram account that is not linked to a Page is invisible to the API we use, so the connection step will fail with nothing to select. Creating a Page is free.
3. A Facebook account that can manage that Page. That Facebook account is also your Socialens login: you sign in with Facebook, and there is no separate password. If you can manage the Page in Meta Business Suite, you have enough access.

If you already post to Instagram from Meta Business Suite or use Instagram Insights, you almost certainly meet all three.

Check it in two minutes

• Account type: in the Instagram app, open Settings and look for the account type section. It should already say Business or Creator. If it offers to switch you to a professional account, you are on a personal one today.
• Page link: open Meta Business Suite with the Facebook account you plan to use. If you can see your Page there and your Instagram account appears under it, the link exists.
• The right Facebook account: make sure the Facebook account you are signed in to Business Suite with is the one you want to keep using. It becomes your Socialens login, and moving a workspace to a different Facebook account needs a support request.

Meta moves these menus around. If a name here does not match what you see, look for wording close to it, or email us before buying.

What Instagram will and will not give you

These are limits of Meta's API, not settings we can raise. They are listed here so nothing about the product is a surprise after purchase.

• You can research public professional accounts only. Private accounts and personal accounts return no data. Neither do accounts that have been deleted or renamed.
• No reach or impressions for accounts you do not own. Instagram does not expose them to anyone but the account owner, so competitor screens show a clearly labeled estimated engagement rate, (likes + comments) / followers. Your own connected account is the exception: real reach, saves, shares and views, straight from Instagram Insights.
• Follower growth history starts the day you add an account. Instagram cannot supply past follower counts at any price, so growth charts build up from when you begin tracking rather than showing last year.
• Post history goes back roughly 200 posts per account. Every screen states the coverage it actually got (post count and first and last post date) and says so when your selected time frame reaches further back than the posts behind it.
• 30 unique hashtag searches per 7-day window. This is a Meta platform limit per connected Instagram account, on a rolling window. Socialens shows you the counter and reuses cached results, so reopening a hashtag you already searched costs nothing.

How signup works after you buy

1. You buy through Lemon Squeezy and get a license key by email.
2. You open /signup, enter the key, your brand name and a username.
3. You continue with Facebook, and Socialens picks up the Instagram professional account behind your Page.
4. From then on you sign in with Facebook. There is no password to set or forget, and your Instagram credentials are never given to us.

Not sure yet?

Email support@agatisgroup.com with your Instagram handle before you buy and we will tell you whether it can connect. It is a faster answer than a refund.

See also our privacy policy for exactly what gets stored, and data deletion for how to remove it.