Understanding who your Instagram followers are is key to being successful on the platform.

Without extensive knowledge about your audience, you won’t be able to create content that answers their needs and interests.

Where to start? The first thing you should be checking is your Instagram follower demographics.

What is Instagram follower demographics analysis?

Analyzing the demographics of your Instagram followers doesn’t differ much from a typical demographics analysis. By conducting one, you’ll be able to find out your followers:

• Sex
• Age
• Location
• Interests
• Lifestyle

Where to take Instagram follower demographics data from?

Once you know what data you’d be looking for, you may wonder where exactly it can be found.

In general, you have two options:

• using Instagram Insights on your mobile device,
• choosing an external social media analytics app.

Heading to Instagram Insights feels more natural but also more obvious when it comes to checking your Instagram followers’ demographics. So instead, we’ll show you how to monitor these data in a third-party Instagram analytics tool, in this case, Sotrender. As it’s an external solution, it offers more in-depth insights than Instagram’s built-in panel. That’s also why it may be worth your attention.

Let’s see what data is there for you to monitor.

Follower demographics – sex and age

The very first thing you can monitor is your follower sex and age segmentation. By taking a look at the chart you can easily find out from which segment you have the biggest number of followers. In our example, the biggest group would be women between 25 and 34 years old.

Analyze your follower demographics in Sotrender

Follower location

Another piece of information you can monitor in Sotrender is where your followers are based.

Monitor your followers’ location in Sotrender

You can monitor your audience location on two levels:

• Top countries
• Top cities

Monitor from which countries and cities your Instagram followers are coming from

Languages

Similar to your followers’ location, you can also analyze which languages your followers are using. This information is based on their Instagram app language settings.

Followers by language tracked in Sotrender

How the knowledge about your followers’ location and language will impact your posting strategy?

• You’ll know in which languages you should communicate on your profile – it may be important especially when you have an international audience.
• You’ll know at what times you should be posting new content to appear on top of users’ feeds.
• It’ll be easier for you to identify topics or events that you should be covering or relating to in your communication – if a huge part of your community is based in another location than you are, you should consider changing your perspective slightly. 

Followers’ interests

Knowing your followers’ interests is extremely important, however, not as straightforward to find out as other metrics mentioned above.

There are at least a few ways of finding your followers’ interests.

1. You can simply ask your current followers what kind of content they would like to see more often on your profile, what content formats they prefer, and how you could help them with their day-to-day problems or concerns. To achieve this, use all the interactive elements available in Stories, like question stickers or pools. 
2. You can simply do your own research – once you more or less know who your audience is, you can identify hot topics pretty easily.
3. You can also analyze your top posts and stories. This is a great source of knowledge as these are not declarative, but behavioral data, so you know exactly which content was liked the most by your audience. Analyzing your top content is easy in any social media analytics tool, including Sotrender.

Checking your Instagram top posts in Sotrender is pretty easy

Why is follower analysis important?

Don’t fall into the trap of just continuously building up your followership. Increasing your number of followers should never be your end goal. What should it be then? Building a loyal community of people who will trust you, engage with your content, buy from you, or follow your recommendations.

So, what you should be aware of is that you won’t be just analyzing your followers, you’ll be analyzing your target audience, meaning people who are your potential customers.

In order to create and publish content that is relevant to them, you need to know who your followers are. By posting the right content, you’ll be attracting the right people to your profile.

Also, keep in mind the quality over quantity principle when creating content but also when building your followership.

If you’re an influencer, monitoring your follower data will become even more important. This is because brands that would like to cooperate with you, will always be asking about your followers’ demographics and other stats. For them, it’s very clear who they want to reach and they need to be sure that your followers are their target audience, too.

How to use demographics data in practice?

Let’s quickly sum up how you can use the knowledge about your followers in your everyday work.

The demographics data will help you to:

• Understand if your current Instagram marketing strategy is working.
• Create content that resonates with your audience’s demographics, interests, and needs.
• Start attracting the right audience to your profile.
• Use the right tone of voice and language (e.g. jargon).
• Decide on the posting times.
• Craft an effective Instagram strategy.