Instagram fame doesn’t happen overnight; it takes strategy, long-term content development, and much more. One of the best ways to help your Instagram account grow is to keep an eye on your followers.

We’re talking about both watching your number of followers and taking a closer look at the followers themselves. Why does this matter and how do you do it effectively? Our experts can guide you through it.

Table of Contents:

• Checking Your Number of Instagram Followers
• How to Check and Track Your Number of Followers
• Checking Out Your New Instagram Followers
• Starting Your Follower Research

Checking Your Number of Instagram Followers

That magical number of followers is how many Instagram marketers and influencers track their success. It’s not enough to just peep at the number every so often, though. Tracking the changes in your follower numbers over time can help you grow your Instagram impact in several ways. Let’s explore why this data matters and how you can track it.

Why You Need to Track Your Follower Data

There are actually several reasons why it’s important to keep an eye on your number of followers. In fact, it can be one of the most helpful and informative metrics you can use for your Instagram growth.

Gauging Your Success

For many marketers and influencers, the number of followers on your account is the be-all-end-all metric that defines how successful an Instagram account is. While it shouldn’t be your only metric, your number of followers can help you gauge the impact your account can have and whether your account’s performance is improving, stagnating, or dropping.

Seeing What Works and What Doesn’t

Every Instagram account has ups and downs in its number of followers. You can use this to see how various changes and types of content affect your follower metrics so you know what works and what doesn’t.

For example, you might put more emphasis into stories rather than posts for a few months. You can see if your number of followers went up or down after you made the change and see how it compared with the trend before.

How to Check and Track Your Number of Followers

Now that you understand why you should be keeping track of your number of followers, what is the best way to do this? On any given day, you can simply go to your profile and look at the number of followers listed at the top. The real benefits of this metric come from tracking how it changes over time, though, and you can do this with the following steps.

Step 1: Ensure You Have a Professional Account

You can only see the trend of your followers over time if you have a professional Instagram account. If you have a personal account, you can turn it into a professional account with these steps:

1. Go to your profile.
2. Click the hamburger menu (the three horizontal lines) in the upper right corner of your profile.
3. Click on “Settings.”
4. Click on “Account.”
5. At the bottom of the account menu, click on “Switch to professional account.”

If you don’t see the “Switch to professional account” option, it means you already have a professional account.

Step 2: Go to Your Insights

Once you have a professional account, you’ll be able to find your follower data among your insights. To do this, click on the hamburger menu in your profile and then click on “Insights.”

Step 3: Go to “Total Followers”

Within your insights, click on “Total followers.” In this section, you’ll see a graph that charts your number of followers each day. You’re able to easily see the trend and how it changes day by day.

Tip: Mark Dates of Strategy Changes

As we mentioned, one of the most useful reasons to watch your follower trends is to determine whether a change to your strategy is helping or hurting. To make this easy, keep a note of the dates when you make certain changes.

For example, jot down the date when you started switching to more story-focused content rather than post-focuses, or the date when you launched an ad campaign. This way, you can find those dates on the chart of your followers and see how the trend changed after that point compared to before.

Checking Out Your New Instagram Followers

The other aspect of checking your Instagram followers is to look into individual followers and get to know their accounts. Let’s talk about why this is so beneficial and how you can do this with your Instagram followers.

Why Look into New Followers

Checking up on new Instagram followers can help you in several ways, from helping you create more audience-focused content to protecting your engagement rates and the integrity of your account.

Differentiate Legitimate Followers from Fake Followers

New followers aren’t necessarily always a good thing. You want your followers to be legitimate people who are engaged and enjoying your content. What you don’t want are fake followers: inactive or minimally active accounts that follow you but don’t ever engage with your content.

Fake followers will drop your engagement rate because your engagement rate is measured as a percentage of your followers. There are also tools that analyze an Instagram account’s followers and determine how many of them are fake accounts. If someone were to use those tools to analyze your followers and they find that you have a high number of fake followers, even if you didn’t know the followers were fake, it reflects poorly on you.

Better Understand Your Audience

Diving into your new followers’ accounts allows you to get a better understanding of who your followers are. Knowing your audience and knowing what they’re interested in and what content they like will help you create content that drives engagement. That’s the top way to grow your Instagram success.

Prioritize High-Engagement Followers

When you check into your followers’ accounts, you can get a strong idea of which followers are the most likely to give you strong engagement. You can see which followers are most active on Instagram and therefore are most likely to engage with your posts. With that information, you can cater your content to those users the most.

How to Check Out Your New Instagram Followers

You understand the benefits of checking into your new Instagram followers, but what is the most efficient and informative way to do this? Follow these simple steps.

Step 1: Identify Your New Followers

One tricky aspect of checking out your new followers is first figuring out who those followers are. Instagram will often give you notifications when someone begins following you, so one option is to make a list of new followers each day when you check your notifications.

This isn’t always fully reliable, though, and if you look at your list of followers, Instagram doesn’t necessarily list them in chronological order. There are third-party tools you can use to keep track of who has followed and unfollowed you on any given day.

Step 2: Check New Followers’ Profiles

Now that you have a list of your newest followers, it’s time to do a bit of sleuthing. Go to each new follower’s profile and look for signs that it might be a fake or low-engagement account. Some of the red flags to look for include:

• Very few followers
• Following far more accounts than are following them
• Very few posts
• Posts that are exclusively graphics or other generic posts rather than personal pictures

Any of these red flags can be a sign that the account is fake and could hurt your engagement rates.

Step 3: Track New Followers’ Activity

For all new followers that aren’t obviously fake, the next step is to see their Instagram activity. There are multiple advantages to this.

First of all, if you aren’t sure whether an account is inactive or minimally active, tracking their activity answers that question. Second, activity tracking is the ideal way to see which of your new followers is most active on Instagram in general so you know who to prioritize as a high-engagement follower.

Third, activity tracking is a game-changer for your Instagram growth. By viewing a follower’s Instagram activity, you can see what type of content they enjoy most so you can design content that appeals to them.

You can do all of this by using one tool: Snoopreport. Snoopreport is an anonymous and discreet Instagram activity tracker. For any public Instagram account, Snoopreport can show you which posts they’ve liked over the past week, which users’ content they’ve liked the most, which hashtags and topics are most common in the posts they like, and more.

Simply follow these steps:

1. Sign up for a Snoopreport account.
2. Purchase your Snoopreport subscription depending on the number of accounts you want to track at any given time.
3. Input the handle for each new follower you want to track and add them to your account.
4. Sit back, relax, and receive each user’s activity report every week.

Snoopreport makes it easy and smooth to check into your new followers and use that information to optimize your Instagram content.

Starting Your Follower Research

Checking your Instagram followers is a vital part of a strong and intentional Instagram strategy. If you’re ready to get started, use the tips above and sign up for a Snoopreport account today.