When you manage a community of 2,000 influencers posting weekly content on Instagram, keeping track of who posted what takes up valuable time you could spend analyzing campaign performance.
That was the challenge facing Tom Azaria, founder of Entrepreneur for Hire, an agency that builds AI agents and automation systems for professional service firms and traditional enterprises.
By automating campaign tracking with Apify and Instagram Reel Scraper, Tom’s team built an automation process for their client, a digital marketing company, to quickly verify whether influencers submitted content correctly, collect metrics, and add them to custom analytics dashboards in a matter of minutes.
When community marketing outgrows manual monitoring
Entrepreneur for Hire specializes in building automations for brands, including companies managing large influencer communities. One of their flagship clients uses social media challenges that 2,000 Instagram influencers transform into reels every week.
“We had to figure out when each influencer uploaded their reel to Instagram, and if they used a specific hashtag correctly. To do that, we had to ask them directly if they uploaded a video, get them to send us the URL, check the date, copy the description… And if they failed to upload their content, we’d ask again the next day,” says Tom.
When participation fluctuated and hashtags weren’t used consistently, it became clear that Tom and his team needed a more scalable, accurate, and automated solution to monitor the reels.
Automated tracking with Instagram Reel Scraper
Tom integrated Apify into his analytics workflow using Instagram Reel Scraper - one of many social media automation tools available on Apify Store.
This particular scraper can extract posts from a predefined influencer list, along with hashtags and engagement details such as likes, shares, comments, and plays.
Using Apify is really easy - you simply call an Actor, run it, and grab the information. You get everything you need with just two API calls.
-- Tom Azaria, Entrepreneur for Hire
With Apify as part of the data analysis workflow, Tom can easily identify which posts belong to active challenges and download clean datasets in JSON, CSV, and Excel, or integrate data directly via API - an ideal solution for sending information automatically to dashboards, such as Monday.com.
“We specialize in automation and AI agents for service companies, traditional enterprises, and more - and scraping plays a significant role in automated workflows,” explains Tom.
Apify Console enables schedules and automatic exports - the dataset gets updated automatically, and Tom’s team is no longer dependent on receiving information from the creators themselves.
Choosing Apify over custom builds
As an agency supporting clients in brand monitoring, Entrepreneur for Hire can - and often does - build its own custom scrapers for clients, especially when they need highly tailored data pipelines or competitive intelligence.
When it comes to social-media scraping, Tom intentionally chose Apify instead of rolling their own solution. He already knew the Apify brand, trusted its reliability, and saw it as the easiest, most straightforward way to get clean Instagram data without reinventing the wheel: “A friend recommended Apify, but to be honest, we just took it at face value.
Everybody knows Apify. The dashboard is really easy to use, with clearly defined input and output. I can limit my calls and tailor my results.
-- Tom Azaria, Entrepreneur for Hire
The analytical edge
The key advantage of Tom’s setup is efficiency and control. By scraping a social media platform directly, the agency keeps its data fresh and reliable.
Because the data pipeline is owned end-to-end, Tom can adjust logic, filters, and triggers at any point without depending on third-party interpretations.
Automate your social media campaigns
Tom’s automated pipeline has improved the way the agency runs influencer campaigns. With Apify as the reliable data layer, they streamlined the process, got faster campaign analysis, cleaner data, and more time for strategy with 100% automated post tracking and a significant reduction in manual reporting.
Instagram Reel Scraper gets you consistent, real-time engagement metrics, scalable to thousands of influencers in a single scrape. You get fewer errors and can integrate your data easily into your clients’ dashboards. Ready to cut manual time and effort on your campaigns?
Learn more about Instagram Reel Scraper in our YouTube video below:
