How to Check TikTok Followers Growth

Watching your TikTok follower count go up is one of the most exciting parts of being a creator, but true growth comes from understanding the patterns behind the numbers. Tracking your follower growth helps you see exactly what's working, what isn't, and how to create more of the content your audience loves. This guide breaks down exactly how to check your TikTok follower growth using built-in analytics, simple manual methods, and specialized third-party tools.

Why You Should Track More Than Just the Follower Count

Your follower count is just a surface-level number. Follower growth, on the other hand, is a powerful indicator of your content strategy's health. It tells you a story about your account's momentum. When you consistently monitor this metric, you can:

• Identify Winning Content: See a huge spike in followers on a particular day? Go back and look at the video you posted just before. You've likely found a hit format or topic that resonates. This is how you stop guessing and start creating content with intention.
• Pinpoint What's Not Working: If your growth stagnates or you notice a dip in followers after posting a certain type of video, that's just as important. It's valuable feedback that a particular topic, tone, or trend might not be the right fit for the community you're building.
• Optimize Your Posting Schedule: Knowing when your followers are most active is a massive advantage. Posting when your community is already scrolling gives your content its best shot at immediate engagement, which can signal to the algorithm that you've got something good.
• Prove Your Value: For businesses and marketers, growth metrics are everything. Showing a steady increase in followers over time is a clear way to demonstrate the ROI of your content efforts to clients or leadership.

The Simplest Method: Using TikTok's Native Analytics

TikTok gives you a powerful set of analytics tools right inside the app. They're free, easy to access, and give you everything you need to start understanding your growth. You just need to have a Creator or Business account to see them.

How to Switch to a Creator or Business Account

If you have a standard personal account, switching is fast and free. You won't lose any posts or followers.

1. Go to your TikTok profile and tap the three horizontal lines (the "hamburger" menu) in the top-right corner.
2. Tap on "Settings and privacy."
3. Select "Account."
4. Tap "Switch to Business Account" or find the option to switch to a Creator Account. Follow the on-screen prompts to select a category that fits your profile.

Once you've switched over, it may take a day or two for your analytics to populate with data.

Finding and Understanding Your Growth Data

After your analytics are active, here's how to check your follower growth:

1. Navigate to your profile again and tap the hamburger menu.
2. Select "Creator Tools" (or "Business Suite").
3. Tap "Analytics."

You'll land on the Overview tab, which shows your performance over the last 7, 28, or 60 days (or a custom range). What you're looking for here is the primary Followers graph. It gives you a quick visual of your growth trend over the selected period. Notice any sharp spikes? Those are the days you want to investigate.

For more detail, tap the Followers tab at the top. This is where the real insights are:

• Total followers graph: This is a line chart showing your follower count over your selected time period. It's great for getting a big-picture view of your progress month-to-month.
• Net followers: This is arguably the most useful growth metric. It shows your follower change on any given day, accounting for both new follows and any unfollows. A positive number means you gained more than you lost. A negative number shows a net loss. This helps you understand an individual video's immediate impact.
• Follower activity: This section shows you the hours and days your followers were most active on TikTok over the last week. Use this information to schedule your content when your audience is most likely to see and engage with it. If you see high activity at 8 PM on Tuesdays, that's a perfect time slot to post.
• Top countries/regions and cities: This data shows you where your audience is physically located. If you find out you have a large following in a country you didn't expect, you could create content that acknowledges their culture or language to build an even stronger connection.

Go Deeper with Manual Spreadsheet Tracking

TikTok's analytics are fantastic for a short-term view, but they only go back 60 days. For long-term trend analysis or to track specific campaigns, nothing beats a simple spreadsheet. Setting one up takes just a few minutes, but it provides a permanent record you control.

This method allows you to add context that built-in analytics can't capture.

How to Set Up Your Tracking Spreadsheet

1. Open Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, or another spreadsheet program.
2. Create columns for the data you want to track. A great starting point is:
   • Date: The day you're recording the data.
   • Total Followers: Your current follower count.
   • Follower Growth: The number of followers you gained or lost since the last entry.
   • Video Posted: A brief description of the video you posted that day.
   • Notes: Any extra context (e.g., "Used a trending sound," "First time trying a Duet," "Posted a behind-the-scenes video").
3. Update it regularly. A weekly check-in is great, but a daily record provides the most detailed insights.
4. To calculate your Follower Growth column, use a simple formula. If your follower counts are in Column B, starting in cell B2, you'd put this formula in cell C3:=B3-B2 This subtracts the previous day's followers from the current day's, giving you a daily growth or loss number. Drag the formula down to apply it to your entire sheet.

The beauty of the manual method is the Notes column. When you see a huge follower spike of +500 in your spreadsheet, you can look over to your notes and see "Stitched Sarah's viral video" or "Answered a viewer question." That tells you exactly what to do more of.

Using Third-Party Tools for Advanced Analytics

When you're ready to get more serious about your data, third-party analytics platforms can offer features that go beyond what TikTok provides natively.

These tools are particularly useful for agencies, social media managers running multiple accounts, or creators who want a competitive edge. They can help you with:

• Competitor Analysis: Many tools let you track your competitors' follower growth, engagement rates, and top-performing content. This is an invaluable way to understand what's working for others in your niche.
• Historical Data: Unlike TikTok's 60-day limit, third-party tools can often track and store your data for much longer, allowing you to see your growth over years, not just months.
• Advanced Reporting: Need to create a professional-looking report for a client or your boss? These platforms excel at generating downloadable PDFs and spreadsheets with clean visualizations.
• Hashtag Performance: Some tools offer insights into which hashtags are driving views and engagement for both your content and competitor posts.

Some popular platforms include Social Blade (great for quick public stats and comparisons) and Iconosquare (a more in-depth analytics and scheduling suite). For most creators just starting out, TikTok's native analytics combined with a manual spreadsheet is more than enough. But once you start looking for a competitive edge or managing several accounts, these tools can really help.

How to Turn Your Data into Action

Gathering all this data is useless if you don't do anything with it. All tracking roads should lead back to improving your content strategy. Here are a few ways to put your follower growth data to work:

• Identify Content Pillars: Look at your top five videos that brought in the most new followers. Is there a common theme? Maybe it's a specific "how-to" format, a particular comedy sketch style, or a series you started. These themes are your content pillars - the foundation of what your audience wants from you.
• Analyze Your Dips and Plateaus: Don't just focus on the wins. Look at periods where your growth was flat or negative. What did you post? Were you experimenting with a much different tone? Maybe you weren't posting at all? This feedback is a gift, showing you what to avoid or improve upon.
• Set Meaningful Goals: Instead of vaguely aiming for "more followers," use your data to set specific, realistic targets. If you know you're averaging 100 new followers per day, a goal of gaining 3,000 new followers in the next month is achievable and measurable.

Final Thoughts

Tracking your TikTok follower growth moves you from a passive content creator to an active strategist. By combining TikTok's own powerful analytics with the consistency of a manual spreadsheet, you get a full view of your account's performance, empowering you to make smarter decisions about what you create and when you post it.

As we built Postbase, our goal was to simplify this exact workflow. We pull all of your cross-platform analytics - including for TikTok - into a single, straightforward dashboard. This way, we can quickly spot growth trends and see what's resonating with our audiences without having to jump between multiple apps and endless browser tabs. It frees us up to focus on what matters: making great content.