Don’t know where to put this but I stumbled upon an error that made it impossible to add a Instagram account with the socal feed plugin that contains a number of emojis in its bio.
After some debugging I was able to solve this by adding the following line to ajax_connect_user function in the php code:
$account_bio = wp_encode_emoji($account_bio); // Normalize emojis
If devs read this. Would be nice to have this fixed in the plugin. Right now we are using a custom version of it that has the fix applied.
For reference, the following emojis are used in our Instagram bio: 
