Maintaining access to your IG account

Access to your IG accounts is given for a limited amount of time. This is a security feature that is written into the API.  

• Personal account tokens expire after 60 days but can be automatically refreshed by Spotlight. This is done using a WordPress cron job, which as you may know, is unreliable. It’s possible that the cron job that refreshes the token does not run on time, which results in an expired token. In this case, the token will need to be refreshed manually by reconnecting the account.

  Important

  By late 2024, Meta will phase out its Instagram Basic Display API, meaning Instagram will no longer allow personal accounts to be used in Spotlight. Learn more about this change.

• Business accounts cannot be refreshed automatically and must always be refreshed manually by reconnecting the account.

If you are integrating a personal Instagram account you do not need to integrate with Facebook, however, if you are working with a Business Instagram Account you will need to allow the Facebook API. This does not actually pull anything from Facebook. It is simply how Facebook allows integration with their business assets and Instagram is ultimately one of their business assets.