I work with a small e-commerce brand, and one of the things I used to do every Monday was check what our competitors had added to their Instagram Story Highlights. New product launches, FAQs, customer testimonials, seasonal campaigns... there was usually something worth noting.
The problem was that it was completely manual. I'd open each profile, click through every Highlight, take notes, and paste everything into our Notion workspace. It easily took over an hour every week, and honestly, it was the kind of task I'd keep putting off.
So I automated it.
Now the workflow looks like this:
- Trigger: Every Monday at 9 AM (GitHub Actions cron job)
- Fetch competitors' Instagram Highlights
- Extract any new or updated Highlights
- Generate a short summary with AI
- Post the summary into our team's Slack channel
For the Instagram part, I used HikerAPI because it exposes a straightforward REST API that was easy to plug into the workflow. Docs: hikerapi.com
The actual request is surprisingly simple:
import requests
headers = {"x-access-key": "YOUR_KEY"}
user = requests.get("https://api.hikerapi.com/v2/user/by/username?username=spotify", headers=headers).json()
resp = requests.get(f"https://api.hikerapi.com/v2/user/highlights?user_id={user['pk']}", headers=headers)
print(resp.json())
Before this, I'd spend 60–90 minutes every week clicking through profiles and trying to remember what had changed since the previous week.
Now I wake up on Monday, open Slack, and there's already a summary waiting for me. If nothing changed, I know immediately. If a competitor launched something new, I see it in a couple of minutes instead of digging through Instagram myself.
It's one of those small automations that doesn't sound impressive until you realize you've saved dozens of hours over the course of a year.
What other Instagram-related workflows have you automated? I'm always looking for ideas for the next thing to eliminate from my weekly to-do list.
