Auto-follow Instagram profiles via Phantombuster and SharePoint

Who’s it for

Community managers, growth hackers, and brands that want to grow their Instagram audience by automatically following new, relevant profiles— while respecting daily limits.

How it works / What it does

1. Schedule Trigger runs hourly at a specified minute.
2. Select Cookie chooses a rotating Instagram session-cookie (time-slice logic).
3. Get List of Accounts downloads a CSV of seed profiles from SharePoint.
4. Follower Collector Agent (Phantombuster) fetches each seed profile’s followers (limit set by ENV_AMOUNT_FOLLOWERS_PER_PROFILE).
5. Autofollow Agent follows up to ENV_PROFILES_TO_PROCESS of those followers per launch.
6. Wait nodes pause between Phantombuster calls and poll until each run is complete.
7. Rate-limit configuration keeps follows between 1 and 40 per hour.

How to set up

1. Add credentials: Phantombuster API, SharePoint OAuth2, (optional) OpenAI API key if you later add AI.
2. In SharePoint › “Phantombuster” folder add:
   • instagram_session_cookies.txt – one cookie per line.
   • accounts_to_follow.csv – header profileUrl, one seed profile per line.
3. Update Set ENV Variables to control profiles/launch and followers/profile.
4. Adjust schedule frequency or Wait durations to meet your plan limits.
5. Activate the workflow; it will follow new profiles every hour.

Requirements

• n8n 1.33 +
• Phantombuster Growth plan (API access)
• Microsoft 365 SharePoint tenant

How to customize

• Scrape hashtags instead of followers: replace the Follower Collector agent with a Hashtag‐to‐Profiles agent.
• Increase speed: raise ENV_PROFILES_TO_PROCESS and cron frequency (ensure you stay within Instagram limits).
• Swap SharePoint for Drive/Dropbox by replacing storage nodes.