How to Track Your Instagram Follower History: Essential Tools and Methods

Some content types may result in a rapid increase in followers. In contrast, some may do the opposite.

You can check these metrics via native Instagram analytics or use tools like Socialinsider to dig deep.

But even then, how do you track which campaigns over the last few years have helped with follower growth? Or in which months do you find follower growth slowing down?

These insights can be found in one report or graph — Instagram follower history. In this article, we’ll see how to track Instagram follower count history, what tools to use, and how this metric relates to other important metrics. Let’s dive in.

Key takeaways:

• Importance of tracking follower history: Monitoring your Instagram follower history helps identify which content or campaigns lead to growth or decline, enabling data-driven strategy adjustments.

• Limitations of native Instagram analytics: Instagram's built-in analytics offer limited historical data, making it challenging to analyze long-term trends or past campaign impacts.

• Utilizing third-party tools: Tools like Socialinsider provide comprehensive follower history data, allowing for detailed analysis of growth patterns over time.

• Benchmarking against competitors: Access to historical follower data enables comparison with competitors, helping assess your brand's performance within the industry.

• Strategic planning: Understanding follower trends assists in setting realistic growth targets and refining content strategies to enhance engagement and reach.

What does the follower count historical data stand for?

Instagram follower count historical data shows how your audience has grown (or shrunk) over time. It reveals the bigger picture behind the daily numbers you might glance at, offering a timeline of how your community evolved.

Instead of looking at your follower count as a standalone number, historical data connects the dots between content, campaigns, seasonality, and growth trends. This insight allows you to stop guessing and start building strategies based on actual performance patterns.

When you monitor how your Instagram followers increase or decrease across weeks, months, or even years, you understand what fuels your brand’s social presence and what doesn’t.

Why is tracking your Instagram follower count over time important?

Tracking your follower growth over time isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s how you turn raw numbers into real social media insights. Here's how it helps.

• Measure the impact of content strategy on follower growth. Not sure if that new content approach is actually working? Instagram followers count history can be your reality check. If the numbers are climbing after a campaign push or content refresh, that’s your green light. If not...well, it might be time to pivot.

• Help you pinpoint the most effective campaigns for driving brand awareness. Follower spikes don’t happen by accident. When you track them against your campaign calendar, you’ll quickly spot what content made people hit that “follow” button and what barely moved the needle.

• Facilitate trends identification. For example, is it just you, or do things always slow down in July? Instagram followers history can help you confirm seasonal patterns so you can plan around them and maybe even get ahead of them.

• Enable accurate forecasting. Use past data to set follower growth targets and timelines. No more pulling numbers out of thin air. With a clear view of your past growth trends, you can set smart, realistic goals for what’s next. Whether you're planning for a campaign launch or a quarterly report, Instagram historical follower count gives you the confidence to back up your projections.

How to leverage native Instagram analytics to get follower data?

Native Instagram analytics can give you a head start when it comes to follower data. You can get basic-level information to understand what campaigns and content brought what results.

What Instagram Insights does and doesn't show you for followers growth

To access Instagram's native analytics (for a business account), go to your main profile page and click on the three lines in the upper right corner of your screen. Head over to ‘Insights’ in the ‘For professionals’ section.

You will see a general overview of the data on the first page. Click on ‘New followers’ to track how many followers you have lost or gained in a specific time period.

You’ll notice that Instagram only provides historical growth data for a maximum of 90 days. If you need to see more than 90 days of data, native analytics will not cut it.

What you can observe and track though, is:

• Follower details: Follows and unfollows from the last 7, 14, 30, or 90 days
• Top locations of your audience: cities and countries
• Age range
• Gender
• Most active times

You can even access Creator Studio to get limited insights on follower count history for Instagram in a report format. Log in with your Facebook account that’s linked to your Instagram business or creator profile. Click the Instagram icon at the top of the screen.

Navigate to the Insights section and click on Audience.

This will show you details like follower count (number, not historical trend), top locations, age range and gender, and follower activity.

Go to Export, and you can get this report in PNG, CSV, and PDF format.

If you want deeper analytics and growth data over a longer period of time, read on.

Why do you need third-party tracking tools for Instagram follower history

Instagram native analytics can only get you so far. Here are three reasons why we recommend using third-party tools for Instagram following history.

• Lack of historical follower data. Instagram only shows your current follower count and very limited growth data.

• Limited time window. Instagram Insights usually shows data for the last 90 days, with no custom date range options. Third-party platforms can store and display long-term data over months or even years.

• Limited export or download options. The follower graph can’t be exported or downloaded for offline analysis. Contrarily, many third-party tools allow you to export data for reporting or presentations.

While using Socialinsider, you can get follower history for more than 90 days, and you can even set a custom range to track Instagram followers over time.

You can download these metrics into PDF, PPT, or CSV formats.

What’s more? You can see how your content strategy correlates with follower growth by getting all content and follower-related insights in one place.

My favorite part? Estimated historical followers data. Due to social media platform API limitations, it's typically impossible to access follower data from before you started using our tool. But with this feature, we fill these gaps so you can get a more complete view of your account’s growth trajectory over time.

Tools and methods to track Instagram follower count history

If you want a detailed history of follower growth over time, you will have to resort to methods other than native Instagram analytics. Here are two methods businesses or creators often use for tracking Instagram followers over time.

Use Excel/Google Sheets for manual reporting

Excel and Google Sheets are great options if you want to use free tools. Depending on how granular you want your reporting, you can manually enter the follower counts every week or every month.

You can calculate weekly/monthly changes to see if there’s a gain or a loss from the week/ month before’s count.

Using the built-in chart tools, you can create a line graph of follower growth over time. This makes trends easier to spot, like which content led to spikes.

When to use this method?

• You’re just starting out. For example, if you're a small creator or business with manageable follower numbers.

• You want full control. You can customize your tracker with columns for posts, engagement, hashtags, etc.

• You don’t want to pay for tools. Most third-party analytics tools are paid. This method is 100% free.

When not to use this method?

• You have thousands of followers. Manually tracking large numbers daily becomes time-consuming and error-prone.

• You need real-time or historical data. Sheets only track what you input. They can’t fetch past data or update automatically.

• You need professional reports. If you're managing social media for clients, they may expect automated, branded reports.

Use Socialinsider for automated reporting

If manually updating a spreadsheet feels like too much work, Socialinsider offers a smart, automated solution for Instagram followers tracking. It’s a powerful social media analytics tool that helps you track follower growth over time without lifting a finger.

You can see how your followers increase over time. You can even set custom date ranges to track how specific campaigns resulted in a change in followers.

The main drawback is that Instagram provides minimal access to historical follower data.

When you add an Instagram profile to tracking tools like Socialinsider, you cannot retrieve follower count data from before the profile was added — the exact past follower numbers. This is a limitation imposed by Instagram's API, not by the analytics tools themselves. That’s why we built estimates for followers.

Historical follower data helps you:

• Understand long-term growth patterns even if you just started using our tool.
• Correlate past marketing campaigns or events with follower changes.
• Create more comprehensive reports with complete timelines.
• Benchmark performance against competitors with a fuller dataset.

If you’re looking to switch tools, we can get your historical posts into Socialinsider dashboard to get accurate reporting on your data.

How to analyze and interpret Instagram follower growth data

Those spikes and falls, they can mean a lot of things. Or they can mean just momentary changes in the algorithm. Here’s how to read and intercept your follower data changes.

Identify meaningful trends vs. normal fluctuations

When analyzing Instagram follower growth, it’s important to differentiate between meaningful trends and normal fluctuations.

Small daily changes, like gaining or losing a few followers, are completely normal and often reflect routine user activity, not necessarily the quality of your content.

However, consistent patterns or sudden shifts are worth paying attention to. For example, if you gain over 100 followers across a few days after posting a specific type of content, that suggests a trend driven by audience interest.

On the other hand, if you notice a steady decline in followers every weekend, it might signal something about your posting schedule or content relevance.

Connect campaign performance to follower changes

When you run a campaign, like a product launch, giveaway, or influencer collaboration, use an Instagram followers count tracker to count followers before, during, and after it goes live. For example, if you gained 300 new followers during a week-long giveaway, that growth can likely be tied to the campaign.

If a campaign brings in followers but low engagement, it may not be attracting the right audience. On the other hand, if both follower growth and engagement rise together, that’s a win.

Over time, this helps you identify which types of campaigns are worth repeating and which ones to refine.

How to run competitive analysis through Instagram follower tracking

Want to see how you fare against your competitors? What does their follower growth rate show? Can you get more details about their audience? Let’s answer all these questions in the next sections.

Benchmark against competitors with more historical data points

To see your competitors’ follower data and other metrics, you will have to take help from third-party tools such as Socialinsider.

To use Socialinsider for benchmarking, simply add your profile and competitor profiles to the dashboard.

Go to the Benchmarks tab on the left side of the pane, and you will see the profiles you added to the dashboard.

Scroll to the bottom, and you will find a comparison of followers' growth percent and the actual follower growth for the selected time period.

Using this competitive comparison, you can:

• Compare growth velocity. Not just the follower count, but the rate of growth over weeks or months. Are you gaining followers faster than competitors or stagnating?

• Identify industry patterns. Add all your major competitors to the dashboard. Spot seasonal growth patterns or common trends across them.

• Find missed opportunities. If your competitors saw growth spikes and you didn’t during similar timeframes, you can dig into what you missed. Was it a lack of posting, ads, or influencer outreach?

• Set realistic goals. Use competitor trends to set achievable growth targets based on actual industry data, not guesswork.

Use reports to get data on overall industry follower growth

What is going on in your industry? Are you an emerging brand on Instagram — should you be adopting certain strategies to grow your followers?

Based on a lot of data from our clients and different industries, we continuously publish new reports that you can use to guide your strategies.

For example, according to our report on Instagram benchmarks, small brands (accounts with less than 5K followers) on Instagram see an average audience growth rate of 38%.

That’s not all. We regularly publish industry-specific reports so you can get an idea of the latest trends, average follower growth rate, engagement metrics, and content strategies working well in your niche.

How to correlate Instagram follower count with other metrics

How does your Instagram follower history correlate with important social media KPIs? Can you draw insights by considering this correlation? Let’s find out.

Engagement rate analysis and its connection with Instagram follower growth

Engagement rate measures how actively your audience interacts with your content (likes, comments, shares, saves) relative to your follower count.

There's a strong connection between engagement and follower growth. In an ideal scenario, consistent, engaging content encourages shares, brings your profile into more feeds, and builds trust with new visitors.

For example, if a carousel post receives significantly higher comments and saves than usual, you may notice a spike in followers shortly after.

Sometimes, the opposite holds true as well. For example, while we’ve seen a spike in followers for Socilinsider’s account in November, we didn’t see a spike in engagement. This was because the content published in that timeframe had a followers increase objective instead of engagement.

By tracking both metrics side-by-side using tools like Socialinsider, you can identify which content types drive interaction and growth, and double down on what works.

Audience quality data and how it ties to follower growth

Thinking you have achieved it when you see an uptick in followers? Wait. Dig deeper and assess whether those new followers actually match your target audience.

Not all followers are equal. Some may never engage, buy, or even relate to your content. That’s where audience quality data comes in. It includes metrics like location, age, gender, interests, and engagement behavior.

For example, if you’re a local fashion brand in New York and suddenly gain 1,000 followers from another country, they may boost your count, but they won’t help with sales or community building.

Tools like Instagram Insights or Socialinsider help you analyze this data so you can spot mismatches early.

Remember, the goal isn’t just more followers; it’s the right followers who relate to your brand and content and will engage, share, and buy from your brand over time.

Strategies to accelerate your Instagram’s follower growth based on data

How do you increase your follower growth rate? What strategies can be used to build a strong community that keeps attracting more people? Here are three ways we suggest.

Optimize content based on follower acquisition patterns

Based on follower acquisition patterns, you can see which content actually attracts new followers and which doesn’t.

Start by analyzing when and why spikes in follower growth happen. Did you gain followers after posting a behind-the-scenes reel, running a poll, or using a specific hashtag? If so, that's a clear signal your audience found it valuable or share-worthy.

Use this insight to guide future content optimization. For example, if you notice most new followers arrive after you post short, relatable Reels with trending audio, make that a regular part of your content strategy.

Similarly, if giveaways bring a follower boost but lead to low engagement afterward, refine your targeting or prize to attract more relevant users.

By aligning your content with what drives real growth, you attract followers who are genuinely interested in your niche. This boosts your numbers and also your engagement and long-term retention.

Find the best times to post by seeing followers’ activity

Wondering what Instagram posting strategy you should have? The answer lies in your followers’ activity data.

By checking when your audience is most active, you can time your posts to go live when the majority of your followers are online. This increases the chances of your content getting seen, liked, and shared right away, boosting visibility through the algorithm.

Over time, you’ll find your “sweet spot” for posting, helping you grow followers consistently and reach more of the right audience.

Final thoughts

Tracking your Instagram followers is more about understanding what drives growth and how to keep it going, rather than just seeing your numbers grow. By consistently monitoring follower trends, engagement, and audience quality, you can make smarter content and strategy decisions that actually move the needle.

Use tools like spreadsheets or platforms like Socialinsider to spot what’s working, what’s not, and when growth spikes happen. The more intentional you are in how you track your Instagram followers over time, the easier it becomes to attract the right people and turn followers into loyal fans.