How do you check that influencers actually posted the Instagram stories you paid for? (Python)

Description and use

An automated workflow using Apify’s Instagram Stories Scraper verifies influencer compliance with contract requirements—brand tag, link, and paid partnership label—by scraping live stories every 12 h and validating against the brief.

Problem

Contracts require influencers to post specific Instagram stories, but verifying compliance is hard because screenshots are late, cropped, or missing and stories expire after 24 h.

Outcome

The automated workflow reliably captured live stories, validated them against contract brief, and produced a concise compliance report, reducing manual effort and eliminating missed or expired evidence.

Workflow

• 1. Configure Apify Instagram Stories Scraper actor with target usernames and maxResults.
• 2. Run the actor every 12 h to capture live stories.
• 3. For each story, check if brand is mentioned or co‑authored, if brand domain appears in link_urls, and if is_paid_partnership is true.
• 4. Print or log OK status for each story or detail which checks failed.
• 5. Append run items to a JSONL file, deduplicate by story_pk, and download media_url before it expires.
• 6. Generate a per‑creator count of OK stories versus contracted number for the client report.

Evidence

Checking it meant asking creators for screenshots, which arrived late, cropped, or not at all. And by the time anyone noticed a missing link, the story had expired.

Source

It reads a creator's live stories with no Instagram login, and each story comes back with mentions, link_urls, coauthors and is_paid_partnership.

Source

Run against the brief, this one would print tagged=False linked=False labelled=False.

Source

Ten creators, two runs a day, 30 stories a day seen twice: 2 x ($0.005 + 10 x $0.002) + 60 x $0.0025 = $0.20 a day.

Source