Pulse is an Instagram analytics workspace I designed and built to make social media reporting lighter for a volunteer communications team, so more of our time goes into understanding our audience and less into copying numbers between screens.
Instagram numbers live across account dashboards, individual post insights and screenshots. Turning them into a report meant a lot of manual transcription.
One workspace that brings profile, post and campaign data together, compares them visually and exports a report the team can discuss.
Automation should handle the counting. People should handle the meaning, and the relationships with the community we serve.
Toggle between the reporting process before Pulse and the process Pulse is designed to support.
Step comparison shows design intent. Time saved has not yet been measured (see the evaluation plan in the full report).
Switch the scenario and metric to see how Pulse compares formats and tracks weekly trends. All figures here are synthetic, so no real account is connected.
Some insight figures only arrive as screenshots. Pulse sends the image to Gemini 2.5 Flash with a strict schema and instructions not to invent unseen values. The tricky part: a value that isn't visible gets stored as zero, so a reviewer has to tell "not shown" apart from a real zero.
| Field | Extracted | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Press "Run extraction" to see the structured output. | ||
Connect an authorised Instagram account via the Graph API, or enter data manually.
Normalise metrics; extract fields from insight screenshots into a typed schema.
Compare reach, engagement, audience and formats across posts and campaigns.
Dashboards and print-ready PDF reports for team review.
AI-extracted figures are checked against the source screenshot before they reach a report.
Only authorised accounts connect. Token handling, data retention and third-party AI processing are documented before wider use.
Time saved, extraction accuracy and usefulness will be measured in a pilot before any impact is reported.
Working prototype used for team reporting.
Test connections, exports and extraction against known values.
Structured trial with authorised team members.
Time logs, accuracy, usability, decision examples.
Publish verified results, collaborators credited.