How to Connect Claude to Instagram via MCP — Storylayer Setup Guide — Storylayer Blog

Claude can publish to Instagram — if you give it the right connector. Storylayer ships a production MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that lets Claude create, schedule, and publish branded posts to Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Ghost from a single conversation.

This guide walks through setup for Claude Desktop and Claude.ai.

What you need

A Storylayer Pro or Agency account (sign up)
An Instagram Business account connected in Storylayer (Settings → Accounts)
For Claude Desktop: a Personal Access Token from Dashboard → Developers
For Claude.ai: just the MCP URL — OAuth handles the rest

Claude.ai (hosted connector)

Open Settings → Integrations → Connectors
Click Add custom connector
Paste: https://app.storylayer.ai/api/mcp
Follow the Storylayer consent screen when prompted
Ask Claude: "List my Storylayer projects and connected Instagram accounts"

Claude will call the whoami and list_social_connections tools automatically.

Claude Desktop (local client)

Go to Dashboard → Developers → Set up Claude Desktop (one-click config) or generate a token manually
Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "storylayer": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y", "mcp-remote@0.1.17",
        "https://app.storylayer.ai/api/mcp",
        "--header", "Authorization:${STORYLAYER_TOKEN}"
      ],
      "env": { "STORYLAYER_TOKEN": "Bearer sl_pat_..." }
    }
  }
}

Cmd+Q Claude Desktop fully, then reopen
Test: "Using Storylayer, create a draft Instagram post for tomorrow at 9am"

Typical publishing flow

Claude should follow this sequence:

whoami — confirm token and project scope
list_social_connections — verify Instagram is connected
create_story — caption, media_url, channels: ["instagram"]
preview_story — show you exactly what will post
schedule_story or publish_story — ship it

For large images, Claude should use request_upload_url instead of embedding base64 in the conversation.

Agent discovery (ARD)

Storylayer publishes machine-readable discovery documents so AI registries can find us automatically:

ARD catalog: https://app.storylayer.ai/.well-known/ai-catalog.json
Agent quickstart: https://app.storylayer.ai/.well-known/agent-quickstart.md

Full docs: storylayer.ai/docs/mcp

Troubleshooting

401 Unauthorized — check Pro/Agency plan and Bearer token format
Empty tool list — fully quit and reopen Claude Desktop
Wrong project — use project-scoped tokens per brand (Dashboard → Developers → Set up Claude Desktop)

See the FAQ for more MCP troubleshooting.