How to Export an Instagram Followers List

Thinking about exporting a list of your Instagram followers? You can, but it’s not as simple as clicking a button in the app. This guide will walk you through exactly how to get your follower data and, more importantly, what to do with it once you have it. We’ll cover the official (and limited) Instagram method as well as the third-party tools that get the job done properly.

Why Would You Want to Export Instagram Followers?

Downloading a list of usernames might sound tedious, but it's a foundational step for some seriously effective marketing activities. It’s about turning a simple number - your follower count - into a list of real people you can analyze, understand, and connect with.

Here are a few practical reasons brands, creators, and marketers export their follower lists:

• Audience Deep Dive: Get a real look at who’s following you. A spreadsheet lets you identify your most valuable followers, spot industry leaders, find potential brand ambassadors, or pinpoint customers you didn’t know you had.
• Identifying Lookalikes: Once you find your top-tier followers, you can use that information to build ultra-specific Lookalike Audiences for your Meta ad campaigns. Instead of targeting generic interests, you’re targeting people who look just like your best followers.
• Competitor Analysis: You can also export the follower list of a competitor. This shows you exactly who they are attracting and where your audiences overlap. It’s an incredibly direct way to understand your competitor’s place in the market and find potential customers who are already interested in what you offer.
• Cleaning House: An exported list makes it much easier to spot and remove bot or ghost followers. You can sort and filter the data to find accounts with suspicious usernames, no profile picture, or imbalanced follower-to-following ratios, helping you clean up your list and improve your engagement rate.
• Building a Community or Lead List: For B2B businesses, your follower list is a warm lead list. You can manually sift through bios to find people with relevant job titles or companies, creating a hyper-targeted outreach list for partnerships, collaborations, or sales.

The Official Way: Instagram’s Data Download Tool

Instagram has a built-in feature to download all of your account data. This is designed for privacy and account portability, not for easy marketing analysis. While it does contain a list of your followers, that list is buried within a huge file of everything you’ve ever done on the platform.

It’s free and secure, but you should know its limitations:

• It can take up to 14 days for Instagram to process your request and send you the download link.
• The download is a huge ZIP file containing all your data: Messages, photos, comments, settings, and more.
• The followers are listed in a simple JSON file (followers.json and following.json) that just contains usernames. It’s not a user-friendly format like a CSV and lacks helpful data like bios or follower counts.

If you'd like to go this route, here's how to do it.

How to Request Your Data on Mobile:

1. Open Instagram and go to your profile.
2. Tap the three horizontal lines (hamburger menu) in the top-right corner.
3. Tap Your Activity.
4. Scroll down to the bottom and tap Download your information.
5. Tap Request a download.
6. Select the account you want to download data for.
7. Choose either a Complete copy or Select types of information. If you only want followers, choose the second option, and then select Followers and following. This will speed things up significantly.
8. Set the file options (Format: JSON is usually easiest to deal with for this specific data, Media quality, and Date range). Tap Submit request.

You’ll receive an email with a link to download your data once it’s ready.

How to Request Your Data on Desktop:

1. Go to Instagram.com and log in.
2. Click the three horizontal lines (More) in the bottom-left menu.
3. Click Your Activity.
4. Click Download your information.
5. Click Request a download and follow the same steps as above (steps 6-8).

Once you get the file, you’ll need to unzip it and find the followers.json file. You can then use an online JSON-to-CSV converter to turn it into a more usable spreadsheet format.

The Better Way: Using Third-Party Scraper Tools

For anyone serious about using follower data, the official method just doesn’t cut it. To get rich, usable information quickly, you’ll need to use a third-party tool, often called an "Instagram scraper" or "exporter."

These tools automate the process of collecting publicly available follower data and compile it directly into a clean CSV or Excel file you can use immediately. This is how you get access to not just usernames, but other valuable data points like:

• Full name and user bio
• Follower and following count
• Number of posts
• Whether the account is private or verified
• Contact information listed publicly (email, phone number)
• External URL in bio

What to Look for in an Export Tool

There are many tools out there, but they aren't all created equal. Here's what to consider when choosing one:

• Safety and Security: Never use a tool that requires your Instagram password. Reputable tools use other methods to access public data without needing full access to your account credentials. Giving away your password is a major security risk.
• Data Points: Check what data the tool can export. Does it just give you usernames, or does it also pull bios, follower counts, and other metrics? The more data, the more powerful your analysis can be.
• Export Format: Make sure the tool exports directly to CSV, XLSX, or Google Sheets. You don't want to mess around with manual file conversions.
• Speed and Scalability: How quickly can it export a large list? And can it handle accounts with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers without crashing?

Most of these tools work as browser extensions or web applications. You typically input the username of the account you want to analyze, set a few parameters, and the tool gets to work, delivering a downloadable file when it’s done.

A Word of Caution

Using third-party scrapers is a gray area. It goes against Instagram’s official Terms of Service, which prohibit the automated collection of data. While scraping publicly available data is common practice across the web, Instagram can penalize accounts it suspects of aggressive automated activity. To stay safe, choose trusted tools that mimic human behavior and avoid exporting huge lists over and over again in a short period.

You've Got the List. Now What?

Exporting the list is the easy part. The real value comes from what you do with that spreadsheet.

1. Deep Audience Analysis

Open your CSV file in Google Sheets or Excel and start sorting. This is your chance to really understand your audience demographics and interests.

• Find Your Power Users: Sort the list by follower count (from largest to smallest). The accounts at the top are your most influential followers. These could be potential brand ambassadors, influencers for collaboration, or simply engaged fans you should get to know.
• Identify Your Ideal Customers: Use the "Find" function (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) to search for keywords in the bio column. If you’re a marketing agency, search for "CEO," "Founder," "Marketing Manager." If you're a fitness brand, search for "personal trainer," "athlete," or "nutritionist." This turns your follower list into a targeted outreach list. You can use this simple function to count how many followers fit a specific persona: =COUNTIF(C:C, "*marketing*") This formula, for example, would count how many cells in column C (your bio column) contain the word "marketing".

2. Vet a Competitor's Audience

If you exported a competitor's follower list, you have a roadmap to their strategy. Scan their followers and ask these questions:

• Who are their biggest fans? Identify the top influencers and media outlets who follow them. This tells you who is paying attention to their brand.
• Do we share an audience? Compare their list to your own (using a VLOOKUP function in a spreadsheet) to see how many followers you have in common. A large overlap means you're competing for the same customers, a small overlap means there's a huge untapped market you could be reaching.
• What kind of customers do they attract? Read through the bios of their most engaged-looking followers. Are they pulling in your ideal customer or a completely different demographic?

3. Create Hyper-Targeted Lookalike Audiences

Instead of relying on broad interest targeting for your ads, you can create a Custom Audience from your best followers. First, filter your exported spreadsheet to create a list of your top 1,000 to 5,000 followers - the ones who best represent your ideal customer. Then, upload this refined list of usernames or contact info (if you have it) into Meta Ads Manager. From there, you can create a Lookalike Audience, and Meta's algorithm will find new users who share the same characteristics as your very best existing followers.

Final Thoughts

Exporting your Instagram follower list opens up a new level of strategic insight that goes far beyond what Instagram’s native analytics can show you. While the built-in data download is a possibility, using a reputable third-party tool delivers the clean, rich data you need for serious audience analysis, competitor research, and targeted advertising.

After you’ve done the hard work of analyzing your list and identifying those high-value followers, the next step is building real relationships. This is where we designed Postbase to come in. Our unified inbox pulls all your comments and DMs from every platform into one clean view, making it effortless to respond to those important messages and start conversations. Combined with easy scheduling and helpful analytics, it’s the perfect way to turn the insights from your exported list into an engaged community.