What Harken gathers from public Instagram posts and comments, and when Instagram is available.
Instagram is visual first, but captions and comment threads carry plenty of words: founders showing off a new office, agencies sharing client results, customers tagging a brand to ask why something broke. Harken reads that text to look for buying moments.
What Harken collects
When Instagram is switched on, an agent's topic source searches it in two ways. A keyword that starts with # reads recent public posts filed under that hashtag. Any other keyword or phrase searches public reels instead. Both searches return what the data provider has indexed, so treat the results as a sample of the conversation rather than every post. Anything older than the source's look-back window is dropped.
Each match becomes a card in the Posts feed with the caption, the account that published it, the time and its public like and comment counts, plus a link to open the original.
Images and videos are not analysed. The caption is what gets scored, so posts with a bare emoji or no caption at all rarely rank well.
Which actions count as signals
- Posting: the account behind a matching caption is shown as the author.
- Commenting: people who left a comment on a matching post, with the text of their comment and when they wrote it. Replies from the post's own author are usually left out.
Likes are counted toward engagement but are not turned into people, since a like on Instagram is cheap and says little about intent.
How the data reaches Harken
Two licensed data providers share the work. The first runs the hashtag and reels searches; the second, which also serves Threads and TikTok, reads the comments under each matching post. Both are paid per request, every request is recorded against your workspace's daily budget, and a crawl that would go over it stops early rather than running up costs.
There is no Instagram login involved. Private accounts, stories and direct messages are out of reach, and Harken never likes, follows or comments on your behalf.
Availability
Instagram belongs to the broader social chatter group in the agent wizard. You can pick it only after it has been switched on for Harken; until then the button is disabled and labelled Soon.
FAQ
Should I use hashtags or plain words?
Mix them. A hashtag keyword reaches posts that tag a topic without naming it in a sentence, while a plain phrase finds reels whose captions describe a problem in everyday words.
Do business accounts show a company?
Only if the profile says so in public. Otherwise the author shows a name and handle, and the audience filter has less to match.