OSINT guide: 7 things you should consider while researching Instagram profiles
Having scrolled down the profile of your person of interest, logged into your new well-prepared sock puppet, usually helps you quickly define what image this person is trying to convey and what interests he or she has. Especially if you are researching multiple accounts of the same person in different social networks. (We previously posted about such research here.)
However, one still might miss some not rather striking but sometimes very important information. Your object of interest probably pays no attention to it, but it really reveals a great deal more than the actual posts.
Today we are sharing with you 7 research tips, which — judging from our experience — will assist you in making a better profile of your object of interest.
Just for the sole purpose of an example, let’s turn to an Instagram account of Jimmy Fallon, a well-known showman. Note, that we deliberately won’t draw any conclusions on Jimmy as making analytical suppositions and proving them is a task for analysts and totally depends on the context of your research (pre hiring research, competitive analysis, connection search and so on).
To start, let’s execute the Instagram account posts info request in Lampyre. The result will be the following three tables:
· Instagram accounts — basic info on the profile;
· Instagram posts — information on posts, including links to them, pictures, description, exact date and time of posting, number of comments and likes, geo labels, etc.
· Instagram accounts tagged in — information on the posts where other users were tagged.
Here we go:
1. The date of the first post. If you open the Instagram Posts table and scroll it down to the bottom, you can learn what Jimmy started with in Instagram. His first posts were made in 2012 and almost immediately he bragged of his haircut.
Obviously, Jimmy is not an Instagram pioneer as the service was launched in 2010 and was already bought in 2012 by Facebook. However, if you were to research some business profile, it would make sense to check its first posts’ popularity to get an idea of the push and pull strategies and possible marketing budgets.
2. The number of comments and likes for each post. Not only it helps to see the most popular posts, but it will also help to evaluate the involvement of Jimmy’s audience and understand what content really draws attention and provokes lively discussion.
Just click the Likes count and Comments count columns’ headers and all the posts will be sorted automatically:
3. Changes in number of comments and likes through time. May be turned to in order to see the dynamics of a profile’s popularity growth. Or its erosion, if the user used to be a heavy Instagrammer but then, by some reason (sometimes worth researching), stopped posting so often. Well, Jimmy’s trend is definitely the growth!
4. Key words in posts. Once again, it all depends on your hypothesis but some keywords can indirectly point to the extent of the users’ interest in something or to their possible income level. Of course, we should not forget that lots of people on Instagram tend to broadcast the image of ‘successful success’ which often has nothing to do with reality.
5. The geography of posts. By visualizing the Instagram Posts table on the map we see the location of all geo tags from Jimmy’s posts:
The heat map mode will highlight the profile owner’s most favorite places to make pictures at. East Coast USA is definitely Jimmy’s fave area.
The feature of visualizing the same data in different visualization modes simultaneously comes in quite handy here. If we address the map, for example we can see right away what pictures were posted in Texas:
6. Social circles. The Instagram accounts tagged in table will uncover the extroversion level of the account under analysis. If the owner likes to be in pictures with other people, who he tags in his posts most often…
Instagram Profile Id column contains info on what profile was tagged in the picture. If we turn to the Content window and see the statistics on the number of times this or that profile was tagged we’ll learn who Jimmy Fallon’s all-time favorite profile is.
If we visualize the data on a graph, we’ll be able to find posts with the biggest number of profiles tagged. Researching what and who is tagged in those posts, for example, may hint at the events visited or at possible collaborative marketing campaigns or else — it’s all up to you and your line of thought.
7. Statistics by post time. Timeline and statistics help to understand if a person posts according to some schedule, if he is a night person or an early riser, what time he leaves his office and so on.
The number of posts per year also matters. Especially when this number changes considerably.
As you see, in 2019 the number of Jimmy’s Instagram posts increased sharply. In some real investigation, this could be useful and meaningful. (You can find a step-by-step tutorial on researching Jennifer Aniston’s Instagram profile here.)
OSINT research is illimitable space for creativity, so the above-mentioned list of options is definitely not the limit. In our next posts, we’ll continue sharing some of our tricks that automate OSINT research and improve the quality and speed of your work.
Tell us, what it is, that you note first, when analyzing social network profiles! Three people with most interesting stories, posted here during the first week since this article is available, will get free 1000 photons from us for their Lampyre research.
