Automate Your Social Media Analytics with iPhone Shortcuts

I Taught My iPhone to Stalk My Profiles and Take Notes

TLDR: Instead of compulsively checking social media apps multiple times a day for follower counts, you can build an iPhone Shortcut that automatically visits each platform, extracts the numbers using Apple Intelligence, and logs them to a Numbers spreadsheet. This gives you data without the doom-scroll.

Let's be honest about what's really happening when you check your social media numbers. You open Instagram to see your follower count, and twenty minutes later you're watching someone build furniture from reclaimed wood. The platform won. You lost time, focus, and probably some self-esteem in the process.

The author makes a sharp observation here: platforms deliberately bury analytics behind enough friction that accessing them requires wading through your feed. This isn't an accident—it's the business model. They want engagement, not informed users. Your obsession with metrics becomes the hook that keeps you scrolling.

Here's what the solution looks like: an iPhone Shortcut that opens each social platform, waits for your profile to load, takes a screenshot, uses Apple Intelligence to extract the follower count from the image, and logs it to a Numbers spreadsheet. You tap one button, watch your phone do the work, and walk away with clean data. No scrolling. No notifications. No algorithm-induced anxiety.

The technical architecture is surprisingly elegant. Three components work together: the Shortcut acts as a data collection robot, the Numbers spreadsheet serves as your data store, and a dashboard layer within the spreadsheet provides visualization. Everything runs on built-in Apple tools—no APIs, no third-party services, no integrations that break when someone deprecates a feature. The pattern for each platform is identical: open app, wait for load, screenshot, extract number, store as variable. Duplicating for additional platforms takes minutes.

For architects and engineering leads, there's a broader lesson here about building personal systems. The author chose Apple Intelligence for on-device processing, meaning screenshots never leave the phone. This is a privacy-first design decision that also improves reliability—fewer network calls, fewer points of failure. But you could swap in ChatGPT for more flexible parsing if cloud processing doesn't concern you. The system is modular enough to accommodate either approach.

The honest limitation? This tracks what's happening, not why. A dropping follower count shows up in your graph, but the dashboard won't tell you whether it's algorithm changes, poor content, or seasonal behavior. It's a tracking system, not an analytics platform. But that constraint is intentional—one metric, consistently measured, across multiple platforms. Sometimes the best systems are the ones that do less.

Key takeaways:

• Social platforms intentionally make analytics inconvenient to access, forcing engagement with the feed
• iPhone Shortcuts can automate repetitive data collection tasks across multiple apps
• Apple Intelligence enables on-device text extraction from screenshots for privacy and speed
• Numbers spreadsheets provide a zero-dependency, forever-accessible data store
• The same automation pattern works for any metric you obsessively check: expenses, habits, business KPIs

Tradeoffs:

• Gain automated data collection but sacrifice deep engagement metrics like reach and impressions
• On-device processing preserves privacy but limits parsing flexibility compared to cloud AI
• Simple spreadsheet storage means you own your data but lack advanced analytics features

Link: I Taught My iPhone to Stalk My Profiles and Take Notes

This article was automatically curated from newsletter content. The summaries and insights represent an interpretation of the original sources.