Measuring Instagram statistics is one of the keys to success when it comes to growing your business on this social platform.
In this article, we’ll show you how to track Instagram follower growth over time and how your business can benefit from using analytics tools for Instagram.
What is Instagram follower growth rate?
Growing your business on Instagram from scratch may not be easy, but if you make the effort to develop a good strategy and produce appealing content, you will definitely start to see some movement on your business profile.
Regardless of whether you are only just developing a new Instagram account or you’ve already been driving business communication on Instagram for some time, sooner or later you will discover that just staying active is not enough to grow your results effectively.
At this point, you will start to seek methods to optimize your account1 to better suit your business needs had me going.
The first thing that comes to mind here is, of course, measuring your profile’s performance, drawing conclusions, and making adjustments to your strategy.
This is obviously the right thing to do on every social media platform, although many marketers focus too much on their content’s performance.
They overlook a statistic that might be even more important. That’s right – I’m talking about Instagram follower history.
Instagram follower growth rate indicates how fast your follower base grows and may have a positive or negative value, depending on the new follows vs. unfollows ratio.
In other words – measuring it gives you clear information if your follower base is growing or shrinking. But how do you calculate you Instagram follower stats?
Instagram follower growth rate is based on a simple equation. To make it work, you’ll need the following data:
The number of followers at the beginning of the chosen time period
The number of new followers gained throughout the analyzed period
(new follows minus unfollows)
Once you have those written down, perform this simple calculation:
Instagram follower growth rate formula
Instagram follower growth rate formula.
Example: Suppose you gained 100 new followers in a month. If you started out with 1000 followers, the equation would look like this:
Follower Growth Rate = 100/1000 ∗ 100% = 10%
That means that your follower growth on Instagram was 10% – which would be a very good result!
Why is Instagram follower growth an important metric to track?
Instagram follower growth rate tells you if your content is reaching new people and grabbing their attention.
You probably wonder, how is keeping track of this metric going to help?
Looking into your fan base statistics will provide you with insights that can:
Help you assess your content strategy
Inspire adjustments to your communications
Show you if your business is growing at a satisfactory rate
Add another dimension to your competitive analysis
Now that you know how tracking Instagram follower growth can support your social media management efforts, let us have a look at how to actually do it!
Instagram Follower Count History
Instagram Follower Count History
Set a completely custom time range for your Instagram analytics in NapoleonCat. Track your own profiles and your competitors, too! Try it for free:
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Using native Instagram analytics tools
Instagram provides a built-in analytics tool called Instagram Insights. Instagram Insights is available for all Instagram accounts that are connected to a Facebook Page.
You can access it by clicking the three lines in the upper-right corner of your screen. Then go to the ‘Insights’ tab and start exploring your profile’s statistics.
Instagram Insights – how to track Instagram follower growth
Tap the three lines in the top-right corner of your screen and choose ‘Insights’ in the dropdown menu.
Instagram Insights – Overview
Overview is the main tab within Instagram Insights. You’ll be able to access the main metrics from the last 7 or 30 days:
Instagram Insights Overview
Instagram’s free tool organizes data into three categories that you can access inside the Overview tab:
Accounts Reached (Reach tab)
Content Interactions (Interactions tab)
Total Followers (Audience tab)
Each one of them gives you an insight into a different category of performance. Let us go quickly through these functionalities one by one.
Instagram Insights – Reach
The reach tab is where you will find some basic information about your content’s reach from the past 7 or 30 days. You’ll see the number of impressions, profile visits, website taps, and call-to-action button taps.
Instagram Insights – reach tab
Inside the reach tab, you can also check your top posts and Stories. If you click on “See All”, you’ll find all of your posts from the last 2 years.
Instagram Insights – Interactions
Inside the Interactions tab, you’ll be able to check some very basic metrics from the last 7 or 30 days:
Instagram Insights – Interactions
Below these metrics, you’ll also be able to access Top Posts, Top Stories, and Top IGTV videos (same as inside the Reach tab).
Instagram Insights – Audience
The audience tab pertains to user demographic data on your account. Keep in mind that this section only analyzes your own followers.
Later in the article, we’ll show you how to easily analyze other Instagram accounts.
Anyhow, you can check your Instagram follower count history (how many users followed and unfollowed you on a specific day). However, this “history” is limited to only the last 7 or 30 days:
Instagram Insights – Audience
So why can’t we just use the last tab of Instagram Insights as it contains the most valuable information and can work as an Instagram follower tracker app?
Well, that’s because only having a full overview of your account’s performance will let you draw the right conclusions.
