How HeyDay Works — explained for everyone
No jargon. No marketing fluff. A complete walkthrough of what HeyDay does, how it captures creator content without ever touching a creator's account, and how brands turn that content into paid campaigns, ads, and ROI.
01 — The basics
What is HeyDay?
One sentence: HeyDay is a tool that quietly watches social media for posts that mention your brand, saves them forever, and helps you turn the best ones into marketing content.
Think of it like this
Imagine you own a coffee brand. Every day hundreds of people post photos of your coffee on Instagram, tag your account in their stories, and use your hashtags. Most of that content vanishes after 24 hours (stories) or gets lost in a sea of notifications.
HeyDay is the assistant that sits in the corner and quietly writes all of it down in a beautiful, searchable notebook — along with who posted it, how many people liked it, and which ones are good enough to run as ads.
What category is this product?
Industry name: UGC management (User-Generated Content) and influencer CRM. Think of products like Archive.com, Grin, CreatorIQ, or Aspire.
HeyDay is not a discovery marketplace where you browse creators. It's a workflow tool for the creators and content that are already talking about your brand — the "earned media" you're already getting for free.
02 — Why this product exists
The problem HeyDay solves
Before HeyDay, here's what a social-media manager at a growing brand actually does every single day — by hand.
Screenshots, screenshots, screenshots
Stories expire in 24 hours. If a creator tags you at 2am and nobody screenshots it before 2am the next day, it's gone forever. Teams literally set alarms.
Spreadsheets held together by hope
Manually logging every mention into Google Sheets — creator handle, follower count, post URL, likes, comments, caption — is hours of data entry per week. Data goes stale the moment you paste it.
Usage-rights chaos in DMs
'Hey, can we repost this?' sent via Instagram DM. The reply is buried under 200 other messages. When legal asks for proof of approval before a $50k ad spend, nobody can find it.
No idea what actually works
Which creators drive real engagement? Which content converted? Without a central system, you're guessing — and overpaying creators whose posts don't actually perform.
The insight
03 — The mechanism
How it works
HeyDay runs on a very simple loop. Understand these four steps and you understand the whole product.
Step 1
You connect YOUR brand's social account
You log into HeyDay with your brand's Instagram Business, TikTok Business, or YouTube channel — the same way you'd log into Buffer or Hootsuite. One click. That's the only account HeyDay ever needs access to. You never ask creators for their passwords.
Step 2
HeyDay asks the platforms 'who is talking about this brand?'
Every 15 minutes, a background worker wakes up and uses the official Instagram / TikTok / YouTube APIs to ask four questions: (a) what posts @-mention my brand? (b) what stories mention my brand in the last 24 hours? (c) what public posts use my branded hashtags? (d) what has my brand posted itself? The platforms return a list of posts and the public profile info of whoever made each post.
Step 3
It saves everything to your private library
Each post gets saved: the video/image, the caption, who posted it, their follower count, likes, comments, views. Stories get downloaded within 24 hours so they're preserved even after they expire on Instagram. Everything is indexed and searchable.
Step 4
You use it: sort, request rights, analyze, repost
Inside HeyDay you filter by creator, engagement, date, hashtag — find the best content — send rights requests — group posts into campaigns — export CSV reports — hand approved content to your ads team. What used to take hours of manual work is now a few clicks.
04 — The most common confusion
Wait — how does it see OTHER creators' content if I only connected MY account?
This is the #1 question everyone asks. The answer is that the social platforms themselves expose this data to any connected business account. Here's exactly how.
Mentions of your brand
Instagram's Graph API has an endpoint called 'mentioned_media'. When any public account tags @yourbrand in a feed post or reel, Instagram gives your connected business account a list of every such post — along with the poster's handle, follower count, and post metrics. This is official, documented, and fully permitted by Instagram.
Story mentions (24-hour window)
A separate endpoint returns stories that @-mention your brand. Stories delete themselves after 24 hours on Instagram, but HeyDay downloads them to your R2 storage within minutes — so you have a permanent copy even after the story disappears.
Hashtag search
Instagram's hashtag-search API returns recent public posts using any hashtag — for example #nikeair. Because hashtags are public, your connected brand account is allowed to query them and receive posts from any public profile using that tag.
Your own posts
For baseline metrics and comparison, HeyDay also pulls the posts your brand account published directly. This is the simplest of the four feeds.
Key point
How creator profile data appears
05 — Onboarding walkthrough
Your first week on HeyDay
What actually happens, day by day, after you sign up. Assumes you're a D2C brand with ~100 creator mentions per week.
Day 0 — 5 minutes
Sign up and connect
You create a workspace (your brand), invite teammates (optional), then click 'Connect Instagram' / 'Connect TikTok' / 'Connect YouTube'. OAuth popup, approve permissions, done.
Day 0 — the first 15 minutes after connecting
Backfill starts
HeyDay immediately pulls the last 30–90 days of mentions and tagged posts (depending on what the platform allows). Your content library starts filling up while you're still exploring the UI.
Day 1
Stories start being captured live
Every 15 minutes the worker checks for new story mentions and downloads them. By end of day 1 you have a full picture of yesterday's earned media — which you've literally never had before.
Day 2–3
Set up your first campaign
Create a campaign called e.g. 'Spring Launch'. Add tracked hashtags (#ourbrandspring) and mentions (@ourbrand). HeyDay now auto-assigns any matching new content to that campaign as it arrives.
Day 4–5
Send usage-rights requests
Browse the top 20 highest-engagement posts from the week. Click 'Request usage rights' on the best ones — HeyDay drafts a compliant message with a clear rights grant link, sends it, and tracks approvals. You now have a paper trail for legal.
End of week 1
Export a report
Generate a PDF/CSV showing: total mentions captured, top creators, top posts, estimated Earned Media Value (EMV), engagement rate. Share it with your CMO. They're shocked at how much free marketing was happening that you couldn't see before.
06 — Feature tour
Every feature, explained simply
A non-technical tour of everything HeyDay does, and what each feature means for your day-to-day work.
Content Library
What it is: A searchable grid of every post, story, reel, and short that has mentioned or tagged your brand across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
Why it matters: One place to find every piece of content about your brand — ever. Filter by creator, date range, platform, content type, engagement, campaign, usage-rights status, hashtag. Think Google Photos for your brand mentions.
Creator CRM
What it is: An automatically-built contact list of every creator who has ever tagged you, with their follower count, engagement rate, post history with your brand, and a performance score.
Why it matters: Stop asking 'who are our top fans?' — HeyDay already knows. Sort by performance score to find creators worth paying. Click any creator to see every post they've made about you.
Campaigns
What it is: Named buckets (e.g. 'Holiday 2026', 'Product Launch: X') with tracked hashtags and mentions. Any new content matching those tags is auto-assigned to the campaign.
Why it matters: Measure ROI per campaign. 'How did our holiday push perform?' becomes a one-click report with total reach, engagement, top creators, top posts — all auto-generated.
Collections
What it is: Manual mood-boards / folders where you drop posts you love. Separate from campaigns — campaigns are auto, collections are hand-curated.
Why it matters: Build a 'next month's ad creatives' folder, or a 'brand style inspiration' folder. Share with your ads team or agency.
Usage Rights Requests
What it is: A guided workflow for asking creators permission to repost or run their content as an ad. Sends a templated message, tracks status (requested / approved / denied / expired).
Why it matters: A defensible paper trail for every reuse. When legal or Meta Ads Manager asks 'do you have rights?', you export a PDF.
Auto-capture scheduler
What it is: A background worker that checks each connected social account every 15 minutes for new mentions, tags, and stories.
Why it matters: Zero human effort. You don't refresh, you don't press a sync button. New content shows up in your library on its own.
Media processing
What it is: Each captured image and video is automatically downloaded to your private storage (Cloudflare R2) and thumbnailed for fast browsing.
Why it matters: Even if a creator deletes their post tomorrow, you still have the media forever. No more 'the post we wanted to repost got deleted, help!'
Creator scoring
What it is: A nightly job that calculates each creator's performance: post frequency, engagement rate, total reach, a composite score.
Why it matters: Discover rising micro-influencers you didn't know were fans. Avoid paying creators whose engagement is just bot traffic.
Metric snapshots
What it is: Every time we re-sync a post, we save a timestamped snapshot of its likes/comments/views.
Why it matters: See engagement grow over time. A post that got 10k views in week 1 and 50k by month 3 is telling you something. Graphs show the trajectory.
CSV / report exports
What it is: One-click export of any view — content list, creator list, campaign report — as CSV or shareable PDF.
Why it matters: Share results with your CMO, client, or agency without giving them login access.
Team & workspace management
What it is: Invite teammates with roles (Owner, Admin, Member). Everyone shares one central library.
Why it matters: Your junior social manager, your senior CMO, and your external agency can all collaborate without messaging each other screenshots on Slack.
Clerk-based authentication
What it is: Enterprise-grade sign-in (Google, email, magic link, SSO-ready).
Why it matters: Your team logs in like any modern SaaS — no password resets, no sketchy auth flows.
07 — Privacy model
Why each brand only sees their own data
HeyDay is a single-tenant CRM, not a social network. Here's what that means and why it's the right design.
Your data is your data
Every creator, content, campaign, and rights request lives inside your workspace. Another brand using HeyDay has their own private workspace. The two never cross paths.
Competitive privacy
You wouldn't want a rival coffee brand to see which creators you work with, your rates, or your campaign ROI. HeyDay enforces that boundary at the database level.
Rights are per-brand
If a creator approved Nike to reuse a post, that approval applies to Nike only. Another brand that happens to have the same post in their library has no rights to it.
A side-effect worth noting
08 — Fit
Who HeyDay is for
Not everyone needs this. Here's who gets the most value.
D2C e-commerce brands
If you sell a physical product and customers are already posting unboxings, try-ons, or reviews — HeyDay captures all of it and funnels your best content straight into Meta Ads. Typical sweet spot: 10k–500k Instagram followers, at least a few tagged posts per week.
Marketing agencies
Manage multiple client brands in one HeyDay account (one workspace per client). Generate white-labelled reports. Stop maintaining 12 different Google Sheets for 12 different clients.
In-house social teams
A social manager at a brand with 5–500k followers who currently spends 10+ hours a week manually screenshotting stories and pasting data into sheets.
Creator/community managers
You know the top 20 creators who love your brand by name, but you've never had a way to see the 200 more who tagged you once and you missed. HeyDay surfaces the long tail.
PR & comms teams
Monitor earned media coverage for product launches. Which influencers organically picked up our launch? Which ones would be worth a paid followup?
Founders at early-stage consumer brands
Before you can afford a full-time social manager, HeyDay gives you automation that would otherwise cost you a hire.
Who this is NOT for (yet)
09 — Real-world scenarios
Real-world example scenarios
Three concrete stories showing how different teams actually use HeyDay.
The skincare startup with 80k Instagram followers
Before HeyDay: The founder noticed mentions via push notifications, hand-screenshotted stories, and kept a "UGC" folder on her desktop. She missed ~60% of stories because she was asleep or in meetings. No data on which creators drove sales.
After HeyDay: The worker captures every tag and story 24/7. End of month 1: 240 captured posts, 180 unique creators identified. She filters by engagement rate > 5%, requests usage rights on the top 15, runs 4 of them as Meta ads. The UGC ads outperform her studio creatives by 2.3× ROAS — because real customers shot them. She reinvests into paid deals with her top 5 creators.
Outcome: 2.3× ROAS on UGC ads, 5 new paid creator partnerships, ~8 hours/week saved.
The marketing agency with 12 client brands
Before HeyDay: The agency ran a separate Google Sheet for each client, a shared Notion doc for reports, and used a rotating intern to screenshot stories for each brand. Every monthly report took 2 full days to compile.
After HeyDay: One workspace per client. Each client's connected accounts feed their own library. The agency manager logs in, switches workspace, exports a report. Monthly reporting time: 2 hours total across 12 clients. They pitch this as a deliverable to land new clients.
Outcome: 90% reduction in reporting time, added a new "UGC library" line item to client packages at $500/mo each.
The enterprise athletic-apparel brand during a product launch
Setup: A campaign is created in HeyDay called "Air X Launch" with tracked hashtag #AirX and mention @brand. The brand seeded 40 creators with free product 2 weeks before launch.
Launch week: 1,200 posts captured and auto-assigned to the Air X campaign. The social team sees a real-time leaderboard: top posts by views, top creators, top hashtags. They DM the top 10 performers to upsell into paid slots. Stories that would have expired are preserved. The CMO checks an Earned Media Value (EMV) dashboard twice a day.
Post-launch: A single PDF report is generated: total reach, EMV, top 20 creators, top 20 posts, approved-rights list for ad reuse. Distributed to the exec team. The approved posts are handed to the ads team — they're live in Meta Ads Manager 48 hours later.
Outcome: 1,200+ pieces of earned content archived, 80+ signed rights approvals, 12 creator ads live within a week of launch.
10 — ROI
Concrete benefits and ROI
Not 'unlock your potential' marketing-speak. Here are the actual, measurable things HeyDay changes.
~10 hrs/week
Saved on manual screenshotting, spreadsheet upkeep, and DM hunting.
100%
Story capture rate — stories saved before they expire, even if your team is asleep.
0
Lost posts. Creator deletes a post? You still have the file in your R2 storage.
2–3×
Typical Meta Ads ROAS uplift when creators' UGC replaces studio creative.
1 click
Usage-rights request with a templated message and automatic paper trail.
Instant
Monthly performance reports. What used to take 2 days compiles in seconds.
11 — Answers
Frequently asked questions
The stuff people actually ask when they first hear about HeyDay.
If I only connect my brand's Instagram, how does HeyDay see other creators' content?
HeyDay never touches creator accounts. Instagram (and TikTok, YouTube) give your connected business account four feeds: posts that @-mention you, stories that @-mention you, public posts using any hashtag you search, and your own posts. All of those are official, documented API endpoints. The creator data inside each post — handle, follower count, avatar — is the same public data anyone on Instagram can see when they open that post. We just save and organize it for you.
Is this legal? Can I really see other people's posts?
Yes — because the posts in question are public posts where the creator voluntarily tagged your brand. Instagram's Graph API is designed for exactly this. However, if you want to REPOST or RUN AS AN AD a creator's content, you still need usage rights — and HeyDay's rights-request workflow handles that.
Why can't I see what content another HeyDay customer has?
Because HeyDay is a CRM, not a social network. Every workspace is isolated. A rival coffee brand using HeyDay doesn't see which creators you work with, your approved-rights list, or your campaign ROI. Your pipeline is yours.
What happens to stories that expire after 24 hours?
The capture worker runs every 15 minutes and downloads the story's media file to your private storage within minutes of it being posted. Even after Instagram auto-deletes the story, you still have the original image/video forever.
Do creators know their content was captured?
Nothing HeyDay does is visible to creators — until you send a usage-rights request. At that point they receive a message from your brand asking permission to reuse their content, with a clear explanation of what you want to use it for.
What social platforms are supported?
Instagram (Business accounts), TikTok (Business accounts), and YouTube. Each uses the respective platform's official API.
How far back does the backfill go?
It depends on what each platform's API allows — typically 30 to 90 days of historical mentions when you first connect. From that point forward, everything is captured in real time.
What's stored, and where?
Metadata (post info, creator profile, engagement numbers) is stored in a Postgres database. Media files (images, videos, thumbnails) are stored in your Cloudflare R2 bucket. Everything is scoped to your workspace.
What if a creator deletes their post or their account?
The media file stays in your R2 storage, so you still have it. We do mark the original post's permalink as broken so you know it's no longer live on the platform.
Can I export my data?
Yes. One-click CSV export for content, creators, campaigns, and rights. Reports also export as PDF.
Do I own the data captured?
You own the metadata and the rights-request records. The media itself is the creator's intellectual property until you get explicit usage rights via HeyDay's workflow.
What does it cost?
HeyDay is in early access — reach out for current pricing. Plans are based on the number of connected accounts and storage usage.
How is HeyDay different from Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social?
Those are publishing and social-listening tools — they help you post, monitor keywords, and reply. HeyDay is upstream of that — it captures UGC, organizes creator relationships, handles rights, and turns earned content into ad creative. Different job.
12 — Vocabulary
Glossary of terms
Terms you'll see throughout HeyDay's UI and in this documentation.
- UGC
- User-Generated Content. Content created by regular users / customers / creators, not by your brand's studio.
- Workspace
- Your brand's private account on HeyDay. All your data lives inside one workspace.
- Social Account
- A connected Instagram / TikTok / YouTube account that HeyDay captures content through.
- Content
- A single post, reel, story, short, or video captured from social media.
- Creator
- Any public profile whose content has been captured into your workspace. Built automatically — you never manually add them.
- Campaign
- A named effort with tracked hashtags/mentions. New matching content is auto-assigned here.
- Collection
- A hand-picked folder of content you've chosen. Non-automatic, for curation.
- Usage Rights
- Permission from a creator to reuse their content. Tracked per-post, per-brand.
- EMV
- Earned Media Value. A dollar estimate of the advertising value of organic mentions. Useful for reporting up.
- Engagement Rate
- Total interactions (likes + comments + shares + saves) divided by reach or followers.
- Backfill
- The initial historical sync when you first connect an account — pulling the last 30–90 days.
- Rights Request
- A templated message sent to a creator asking for permission to reuse a specific post.
Now that you get it — try it.
Connect your brand's social account in under 5 minutes. Watch captured content start appearing in real time.