How to track Instagram follower growth: Essential Tips and Tools

It’s not always a cakewalk to grow your business on Instagram from scratch. You should put in the time and effort to create interesting content with a solid strategy. You will start to notice an increase in activity on your business profile by doing so.

Whether you are just starting an Instagram account or if you have been using one for some time, eventually you will realize that simply remaining active is not going to do much for you.

There is a simple equation to help you track your Instagram follower growth rate. The information below is important to make it work.

1)The number of followers there were at the start of the selected time

2) The total number of new followers added during the examined time frame (new follows minus unfollows)

Follower growth rate = [Followers gained / Base followers Number]*100

Now let’s dive right into why it is important to track your followers and some tracking tools.

Table of Contents

Why is it important to track your Instagram follower growth?

Why is it important to track your Instagram follower growth?

It is always best to avoid buying Instagram followers. There should be one kind of follower growth, and that is organic following.

Why so?

The followers that you have bought for Instagram won’t be active. They won’t boost the growth of your company, instead, they will just boost the number of people who follow you.

Your aim should be to engage your followers. You should make them respond to your posts because Instagram will notice all these things.

Because of this, it’s essential to track your Instagram follower growth. You must ensure that your followers are real people and not robots.

If you track your Instagram follower growth, it will benefit you in other ways too, like:

Analyze the performance of your content strategy

Shows the expansion rate of your brand presence

Helps in evaluating your competitive performance

Top free Instagram tools to track your Instagram follower growth

Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights helps you learn more about your profile’s followers and performance. It also helps you gain insights into your viewers’ engagement with posts as well as stories and videos.

You will get details of your followers- including their location, growth rate, and the number of new followers. You can also learn when they are most active, as well as the gender and age breakdown.

In 3 simple steps, you can view insights in your posts:

Go to your Instagram profile

Select the image or post that you want to view insights on

Tap on the “view insights” button below the image

With Insights, you will be able to view the following:

Recent highlights: This shows any increase in account performance in your custom time frame in the past 3 months.

Accounts Reached: This will show you the total number of accounts that have engaged with your content over a while.

Audience Engaged: This will show the data ( cities, age, gender, etc ) of the users who are engaged in your account irrespective of whether they are your followers or not.

Audience Reached: This also shows you the demographic data of all the users you have reached over some time.

Contents you have shared: This provides the statistics about the number of posts, reels, videos, stories, etc that you have shared over some time.

Keep in mind that to use this service, you must have an Instagram business account or a creator account.

Instafollow

An Instagram-specific smartphone app called Instafollow gives you information about your following count. Users of iOS and Android phones can use this app.

Before using it, you should first download the app from your app store and connect it to your Instagram account. Once installed, you’ll be able to identify people you follow but who don’t follow you back, easily follow and unfollow people, and track your Instagram follower growth.

Instafollow provides analytics for the following:

Your least popular posts
Your best followers are those who like and comment on your posts the most
Your non-followers who like and comment on your posts the most
Your worst followers are those who don’t like or comment on your posts
Users you like, but not following
Users you follow, but never liked their posts
History of users you unfollowed
Users who requested to follow you
Oldest and Newest Instagram Users
Your most popular posts are based on likes and comments

If you are willing to pay a fee, Instafollow also shows you data on users who block you and helps in tracking deleted likes and comments.

Instafollow does not provide the option to show any automated follow/unfollow features. Users can follow and unfollow within the app only and on a manual basis.

Another con of Instafollow is that to maintain app stability, the follower count is suggested to be under 50,000 which can be a major issue for bigger channels.

Crowdfire

Crowdfire helps you find and schedule your social media content and also manages all your social media accounts from one place.

Monitor and reply to all your social mentions from a single dashboard.
Deep dive into Advanced Analytics, and download ready-to-present reports.
Build custom reports and schedule the export of these reports.
Compose your posts and schedule them to go out later.
Take away the headache of crafting separate posts for each social profile and automagically customize your posts for all your profiles!
Use the Crowdfire Chrome extension to share your favorite pages from the internet to all your social accounts in 2 easy clicks!
Add your favorite websites and blogs as your source for new content by using the RSS feature!
Manage multiple clients using Crowdfire profiles.
Automatically find and recommend articles and images your audience will love, so you can share them on all your social profiles and keep your timelines buzzing!
Keep an eye out for any updates on your website, blog, or online shops; and create quick, beautiful posts about the update to easily share on all your social profiles
Schedule all your posts in advance and they will be posted automatically at the best times or at a time chosen by you. It saves you tons of time and effort!

Although Crowdfire offers a huge variety of features, it sometimes makes linking accounts difficult, and some processes may take a lot of time to set up.

Socialbakers

With this app, you can track your Instagram follower growth and see the statistics of your best-performing posts all in one dashboard. You will be able to review your top-performing stories, posts, and follower growth.

This app can be helpful for medium to large brands and agencies.

One of the main innovations of this app is that it allows a quick vertical summary of all the pages monitored through different social networks with the ‘Summary option’

This functionality provides the data on the growth in the number of followers, the total number of posts made the number of interactions, and their distribution by type, as well as the top 5 posts with the best results.

The comparative dashboard with competition allows you to analyze the most important KPIs of the brand next to the most important competitors and compare them with the industry average through the creation of labels.

Two disadvantages of this app :

No Tiktok support
Expensive if all you want is the influencer tools

Union Metrics

Union Metrics is a social media marketing tool for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), advertising agencies, and brand marketers that empowers social marketing intelligence to reach audiences and grow businesses.

It offers the statistics that every marketing team needs to create a successful social media strategy and guide day-to-day social media execution. Its many features work along with a flexible usage model to swiftly adjust to changes, and it keeps an eye on all the social profiles to see how the material is doing.

Union Metrics offers analytics for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It builds a thorough grasp of all relevant Twitter activity, monitors all Facebook pages with high-quality statistics, tracks Tweets about campaigns in real-time, learns how the audience connects with the content and improves the content to better reach the target audience.

Advantage: Users express their satisfaction with the hashtag tracker as it keeps an eye on the hashtags that are most popular among your user base. A portion of UM’s service is also available for free, and UM is capable of handling enormous amounts of data: One user mentioned using this program to follow one of their hashtags that had more than 1.5 million Instagram photographs.

Disadvantage: If you need to handle multiple accounts, it can be expensive, depending on which plan you need. Some users also noted that it can sometimes be slow to load.

What are some of the best tips for growing your Instagram followers over time?

Stay away from fake followers

According to research, the average engagement rate for Instagram influencer accounts with under 100 followers is around 8%. This rate falls to about 4 percent between 1,000 and 10,000. Accounts with more than ten million followers only engage at a rate of 1.6 percent. Hence, showing the continued inverse relation between engagement and follower size.

You most likely don’t consider your clients to be stupid. They are aware of what actual engagement looks like. When your post only receives 40 likes despite having 10,000 followers, they start to worry that something is wrong. If one customer points it out, then your whole credibility goes down.

Optimize your Instagram profile

According to research, people form an online opinion of your brand in less than two-tenths of a second. Your customer will determine in less than a second whether you are worth his time and money.

How do you prevent potential customers from leaving your Instagram profile right away?

Simple. You must make your Instagram profile interesting.

The first step to attracting natural followers is to improve your Instagram profile. Your profile serves as a snapshot of your complete brand. You must use it to present your brand’s finest side to your audience.

Your profile picture, bio, and your Instagram feed are the first things customers see when visiting your Instagram page. So, it makes sense to take care of these as early as possible.

What your brand stands for should be mirrored in your profile picture. Usually, this should be the logo for your business. You might maintain consistency across all your social media accounts with their assistance.

Additionally, you need to make your Instagram display name and username as search friendly as possible.

Your Instagram bio should be easy to read and scan. Include a few of your target keywords so that visitors will know what to expect from your website.

You only have one space in your bio, which is the link. To point your customers to your website, add a URL there. Moreover, you can add many links to your Instagram profile using a website like Linktree if you want to direct users to particular website pages.

Interact with your Instagram audience

You must develop a close bond with your audience if you want to create a thriving community. After posting content on your Instagram feed, reply to messages and comments instead of ghosting. 83 percent of consumers expect brands to reply to comments within a day or less.

Using social media management tools can help you manage your communications. With the help of apps like Sociality.io, brands can optimize their Instagram engagement. With this application, you can communicate with your team via Instagram, reply to comments on posts, and so much more.

To Wrap it Up

Your Instagram follower growth provides you with a clear picture of how well your Instagram account is performing. Your brand’s Instagram engagement can be influenced by your follower count, and tracking it will tell you whether it’s time to change your strategy.

Luckily for you, there are several tools available, both free and paid, that can make sure you don’t get caught off guard. Your needs will determine the best option for you.

To build your social presence, it is very important to establish yourself as a brand. Graphy understands that well, and that is why Graphy offers a branded website and mobile app despite the plan.

The second step would be to build awareness about yourself. That is why Graphy offers advanced marketing and sales tools. You don’t have to switch tabs to market your presence. Graphy is an all-in-one platform that offers you this feature on the platform itself.

We very well understand that for the first time or even anytime, you can fall into a doubt trap. To keep that in mind, Graphy offers robust 24*7customer support, and the list goes on and on. Check out below the list of things Graphy offers.

How to track Instagram follower growth: Essential Tips and Tools

Why is it important to track your Instagram follower growth?