Instagram is adding more features to the Graph API it debuted last year to prod businesses and developers to migrate away from its old API that is being shut down over the next two years.
Through Instagram’s Graph API, businesses will now be able to schedule posts, see public posts that mention or tag them and check out other business profiles, the Facebook-owned photo-and-video app announced on Tuesday.
The new features are meant to make it easier for businesses to manage their organic accounts on Instagram. However, there’s a catch. While any business with access to Instagram’s Graph API will be able to use it to view posts that mention and tag them or to see other businesses’ profiles (including their posts, bios, website links and follower counts), to schedule posts via the API a business will need to go through a vendor that’s a member of the Facebook Marketing Partner program.
The new features are also intended to encourage businesses to switch away from Instagram’s Platform API that Instagram is shutting down. That shutdown will happen in three phases, the first of which will begin around the end of July 2018. At that time, Instagram will deprecate the ability to use the Platform API to obtain follower lists and relationships between accounts and to comment on public posts, according to an Instagram spokesperson. It’s unclear what the next two phases will entail, but they will conclude with the Platform API being fully shut down in early 2020.
Unlike the Platform API that had been open to business and non-business accounts alike, the Graph API is only available to Instagram accounts that are connected to a Facebook Page and have been converted to Instagram’s version of Facebook’s Pages called business profiles that were introduced in May 2016.
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