Instagram Reels

Node type: research:instagram_reels Category: Research

Description

Search Instagram Reels by keyword and get back reels people are actually watching, with play counts, followers and captions.

Pick the ones worth copying, and each becomes its own node holding the reel's video and its caption.

One box, two modes

The search field takes either:

• a keyword ("nostalgia edits", "electrolytes"), which runs a reels search, or
• a link you pasted from Instagram (instagram.com/reel/…, instagram.com/p/…, or the version with the handle in it), which pulls that one reel straight in.

You do not switch anything. Paste a link and the field relabels itself, the filters step aside, and you get that reel.

Both cost the same: one of your daily research searches.

What the numbers mean

Number	What it is
Plays	video_play_count. The figure Instagram shows publicly. This is the headline on the card.
Views	A second, smaller number Instagram also publishes. Kept separate because they are not the same thing.
Likes	The like count, or "Hidden"
Comm	Comments

"Hidden" is not zero. Plenty of accounts turn their like count off, and Instagram then reports it as unknown. Showing a 0 there would be a lie, so the card says Hidden and the "Min plays" filter never drops a reel for it.

There are no share or save counts anywhere in this data, so unlike the TikTok node there is no shares column and no engagement-rate chip. A rate computed without shares would be a different number wearing the same label.

Filters

Filter	What it does
Posted	Any time (default), last 24 hours, week, month, or year
Min plays	Applied by us after the search, over the reels the search returned

Filters do not apply when you paste a link, because there is only one reel to get.

Canvas ports

No input ports. The reel is picked in the overlay and pinned to the node.

Outputs

ID	Label	Type
video	Video	VIDEO
metadata	Metadata	JSON
caption	Caption	TEXT

Deliberately the same three ports as the TikTok Content node, so anything you have already wired to one works with the other. Send video into Content Analyzer for the hook and the shot list, and caption into an LLM node to rewrite the copy for your product.

Cost

Free. Searching costs a daily allowance (5/day on free plans, 100/day on paid), not credits, and running the node costs 0 credits, because the video was already saved to Wireflow storage when you picked the reel.

Saving a reel counts against that same allowance, so a search plus a save is two of your five. Searches on all three research sources share the one allowance, but only Instagram and Meta Ads saves spend from it (a TikTok save only copies a thumbnail, so it is free).

Notes

Instagram serves reel videos from signed links that expire, and a reel's page itself is login-gated, so there is no permanent link to download from later. Wireflow copies the video to its own storage the moment you save a reel. That is why saving a batch takes a few seconds, and why the node keeps working weeks later.

If a reel's video cannot be copied, it is not saved. You get told which one, instead of a node that looks fine and has nothing in it. Private accounts cannot be read at all.

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See also: research:tiktok_search, research:meta_ads, research:content_analyzer.