Your most active Instagram followers are also your most valuable followers. These users are the ones who engage the most with your content, and the ones who are most likely to convert to a sale. The added likes and comments on your posts also help push your content to more users, and ultimately more followers.

The difficulty is to identify these active Instagram followers and build an engagement model that can quickly turn these followers into customers. Sadly, the native Instagram app provides little to no help. The only information Instagram provides is a list of recent activities on your Instagram account. Line by line, Instagram shows you who recently liked or commented on your posts, or followed you.

With the Instagram app, there is no easy way to tell if the user is a follower, how often they engaged with your content or if the user is even worth engaging with. Luckily, many free 3rd party analytical tools make this process easy. In this article, we will walk you through step by step to identify your most active Instagram followers using SocialRank, and the process to build an effective engagement model to convert those followers into a sale.

What is SocialRank?

SocialRank, as described on their website, is “The easiest way to identify, organize, and manage your audience on Twitter and Instagram.” It works by pulling all your following and followers on either Instagram and Twitter and provides you an easy to use web-interface to split and segment the information as you wish.

You can sort by:

Most valuable: The most in-demand and influencer profiles

Most engaged: A sample of the profiles that have interacted with you the most in the past 45 days

Best follower: The most valuable profile that has engaged with you

Most followed: The profiles who have the most followers.

The data is incredibly detailed and lists each follower in a table form. The tool provides the name and username of your followers, the total number of followers they currently have, the average likes/comments they receive on their posts, and their engagement rates.

In addition to the powerful sort features, you can further filter down your dataset with bio keywords, the number of followers/followings, location, activity and much more.

Lastly, with SocialRank, you can see a summarized breakdown of all your followers in a single report. In this report, you will have all the information you need to determine the health of your followers and Instagram account.

The report will analyze your:

Total Reach: The compilation of the full following of your followers. This metric shows the comprehensive cap on all potential reach.

Followers Activity: The division of your audience based on usage frequency. This data can aid users in pinpointing inactive and abandoned accounts.

Followers Distribution: This is the distribution of how many followers your audience has. This data is useful to gauge the quality of your audience.

Fake Accounts: This is the breakdown of your fake & real audience. This data is useful to see how to best interact with your audience.

Gender: The separation of your audience by gender. This information can be useful in both campaign targeting and market research.

Profanity: This is the profanity usage breakdown for your audience. This data is useful to see how to best interact with your audience.

Default Avatar: This is the avatar breakdown for your audience. This data is useful to see how to best interact with your audience.

Private Account: This is the breakdown of your private & public accounts. This data is useful to see how to best interact with your audience.

Top Followers Location: Your breakdown of followers by country, city and US states.

Post Type: The type of content your audience is sharing. This feature adds direction to the style of content to push most frequently.

Popular Time To Post: The leading times your audience is posting (adjusted to your local timezone, Eastern Standard Time / GMT-5). This data presents the opportune time to share content while followers are active on the medium.

The best part is the tool is free! The only time you will need the premium version is if you want to export the data into a CSV file or save custom search queries. The premium version will cost $49 per month.

Getting Started with SocialRank

First, you need to connect your account with SocialRank. It will take a few minutes for the tool to pull all the necessary information to populate your dashboard. Once the dashboard is ready, SocialRank will send you an email to notify you.

Once your account is ready, the tool is fairly straightforward. From the filter bar, select Sort: Most Engaged and the tool will populate your most active followers. You can switch between views and the number results per page. We would recommend you use the table view and show 100 results per page.

If you don’t want to pay the $49 per month fee for premium so that you can extract to CSV, the simple solution is to copy the table, open Microsoft Excel, and paste the data as text. From there, with some simple formatting, you can get the table to look something like this.

Now you have a clean list of active followers you have the opportunity to engage with. But who exactly should you engage with, and how should you approach these people? We’ll explore this in detail in the next section.

How to Convert your Most Active Followers?

There are two ways you can convert your most active followers. Firstly you can convert them to a sale of a product or service, or you can convert them to help promote your Instagram page to grow your following.

1. Converting to a Sale

If you’re looking to convert your follower base to a sale, start by filtering down the list of followers that you can fulfill your products and services to. If you’re a local retailer, the last thing you want is to sell to customers halfway around the world.

Next, you want to target active users. You can do this by filtering users that have recently posted within the last 45 days.

You also want to target real users, so I would only target users that have an avatar or profile picture set.

Lastly, you want to target customers who you can communicate with. If you only speak English, use the tool to filter followers who have an English profile.

Now you have a clean list of potential customers you can interact with. But before you start messaging away, you should distinguish between two type of followers: Customers and Influencers.

Customers versus Influencers, and how to market to them

Customers who are users that use Instagram for personal purposes. Whether they use Instagram to connect with friends or use it as a memoir of their lives, they have little to no intention of building a follower base.

Influencers are users who have a large number of followers, and power to influence the purchasing decisions of their follower base.

You want to target these two groups of followers differently. For customers, you want to try a direct sales approach. Message them with why they would want to use your services, and educate them on your value proposition.

For influencers, you want to provide your services for free or at a special discount. The outcome you’re looking for is for the influencer to try your product, love it, then share with their follower base. The secret here is that they need to LOVE your products or services. If not, the strategy can backfire on you.

How to Filter for Customers and Influencers

To filter for customers, find users that have between 0-1,000 followers and a followers/following ratio greater than 1. As reported by SearchEnginewatch, in a survey of US teens, 11% of respondents had 101 – 200 followers on Instagram. The US teen average was 150 followers. Therefore, most personal accounts will not have over 1,000 followers.

When targetting influencers, it’s not about targetting the account with the largest follower base. Your goal should be to target influencers that have more than 10,000 followers but is +- 50% of your current number of followers. For example, if you currently have 25K followers, you should only target influencers that have between 12.5k to 37.5k followers.

Anything outside that range is either too small for you to engage with, or so large that its unlikely that brand or account will associate with you. If you have less than 10K followers, we would recommend you wait before executing this strategy.

2. Converting to Grow your Followers

If you’re looking to use your active followers to help grow your Instagram account, we would recommend only targetting you followers who are influencers with a shoutout for shoutout strategy.

Shoutout for shoutout works in many ways. It can be as simple as a story shoutout to follow one another, or a series of posts promoting each others page. Similiar to the filters above, we would recommend only targetting influencers +- 50% of your current number of followers.

Influencers who have less or the same amount of followers, try to trade two of your shoutouts for one shoutout from them. Influencers who have more followers than you, trade upwards to five shoutouts for one.

How to Find More Active Followers

So hopefully we pretty much-covered everything about finding active users that are currently your followers. But what about finding more active users and converting them to followers?

The simple answer is:

1. Create compelling and interesting content for a specific niche

Learn more: Step-by-Step Guide to Skyrocket your Instagram Growth

2. Leverage the use of Instagram automation to filter for active users to engage with

As we mentioned in this article: The Truth Behind the Follow/Unfollow Method on Instagram, manually filtering for and engaging with active users is both challenging and time-consuming without the use of automation. If you’re looking to only engage with active users, Instagram automation is the best way to do so.