When attempting to save an Instagram feed the following message occurs:
Your changes have NOT been saved. The following errors were detected:
Your Instagram Business Account has reached the 30 hashtag search limit for a
7 day rolling period, please try again later or use another Instagram Business
Account to activate or preview this feed.
Information
The Instagram (Facebook) Hashtag Search API has an imposed limit of 30 hashtag searches in a rolling 7-day window, per Instagram Business Account. Instagram counts the number of unique hashtags that are searched rather than the number of requests, so you can search the same hashtag multiple times which will count as 'one hashtag' in terms of this limit.
While the limit is sufficient for most marketing use-cases, attempting to activate or preview an Instagram hashtag feed once this limit has been reached will fail. You will be warned when you are approaching the limit and alerted when further searches cannot be performed.
When the limit is reached, existing feeds will continue to execute but you will not be able to preview or activate further feeds until such time as there are less than 30 hashtag searches over the last 7-day period.
Is this a problem only on the Cheetah Experiences platform?
No, any other system that searches Instagram using their API will contribute to this limit, meaning that if you use an Instagram Business Account in multiple systems, this limit will be reached more quickly.
You can read more about the limitation here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/hashtag-search/
What do do
There are two courses of action available when this occurs:
- Use a different Instagram Business Account
- The 30 hashtag search limit is per Instagram Business account.
- Wait and try to activate the feed at a later time/date.
- Over time your search allowance will begin to reset so you can perform more searches.
Raise the issue with the wider team to ensure that the Instagram Business account is not being used in other systems outside the Cheetah Experiences platform to retrieve and search for content.
Using another Instagram Business Account
At present, you may only connect one Instagram Business Account to a Fanpage, this means that in order to use another Instagram Business Account to activate a feed or preview results, your Facebook user account must have a role on another page with a different Instagram Business Account connected. As shown here:
The steps outlined in this article will explain the full process of creating a new Fanpage (if another is not available for your use) and connecting it to another or new Instagram Business Account.
When more than one Instagram Business Account is available to use, you will be able to select another account from the drop-down list in your feed.
Other recommendations
We recommend searching and exploring Instagram hashtags using the Instagram app or website and, once the relevant one has been identified, setting up your feed in the platform. This will avoid exploratory searches counting towards your 7-day limit.