Export Instagram Followers: Download the List as Excel/CSV

Export Instagram followers – there's no button for that anywhere in the app. If you need your follower list as an Excel or CSV file, you have to take a detour: the official data export, a browser extension or a scraper tool. This guide puts all four methods side by side – with a step-by-step walkthrough of the official route, an honest look at the risks, and what GDPR and Instagram's rules have to say about it.

Why you'd want to export your follower list in the first place

An exported follower list is more than a toy for data nerds. These are the five most common use cases:

• Spotting unfollowers: Compare two exports taken a few weeks apart and you'll see in black and white who unfollowed you – no risky unfollower apps that demand your login.
• Backup before account trouble: If your account gets suspended or hacked, access to your followers is gone too. An export at least preserves the usernames of your community.
• Audience analysis: In Excel you can spot patterns the app will never show you – like how many of your followers have a certain keyword in their bio or how big their accounts are.
• Outreach lists: A competitor's followers are almost always your target audience too. As a CSV, they become the foundation for targeted campaigns, for example via mass DM.
• Customer overview: Shops and service providers cross-check which customers already follow them – and which followers aren't customers yet.

Method 1: Instagram's data export – the official way

Instagram offers a full data export that also includes your follower and following lists. Here's how to request it:

1. Open your profile → menu → Accounts Center.
2. Go to Your information and permissions → Download your information.
3. Choose 'Download or transfer information', select your account, then 'Some of your information' → under Connections: Followers and following.
4. Pick JSON as the format (for further processing) or HTML (for viewing), and 'All time' as the date range.
5. Instagram emails you a download link – often within a few hours, though officially it can take up to 48 hours.

This route is official, free and carries zero risk of a ban. But it has three catches: you get your own data only – other accounts are off limits. The format is JSON or HTML instead of a clean CSV file. And you have to wait for the export instead of getting it instantly.

How to get your Instagram followers list into Excel

After downloading, you'll find the file 'followers_1.json' inside the ZIP archive under 'connections/followers_and_following/'. From here, there are two ways forward:

• Excel with Power Query: Data → Get Data → From File → From JSON. Excel parses the structure, you expand the columns and end up with a table of usernames and the timestamp of each follow.
• The HTML route for small accounts: If you picked HTML as the format, open the followers file in your browser, select the list and paste it straight into an Excel sheet. With a few hundred followers, in our experience this is the fastest way.

The official export won't give you more than username and date, though – no bio, no follower counts, no way to sort by relevance. That's enough for a backup, but thin for any real analysis.

Methods 2 and 3: Typing it out by hand or a browser extension

Typing it out manually is only an option for tiny accounts: open the follower list, copy the usernames into a spreadsheet, done. Up to roughly 100 to 200 followers this is faster than hunting for a tool – beyond that it turns into busywork and gets error-prone.

Browser extensions from the Chrome Web Store promise a one-click export of your follower list as CSV. Some of them actually work, but the model has two serious weaknesses:

• Security and ban risk: The extension operates inside your logged-in Instagram session. You're effectively handing a third-party provider access to your account – and Instagram is especially good at detecting unusual bulk requests coming from your own login. In the worst case, that ends with 'Action Blocked' or an account suspension.
• Subscription traps: Many extensions export the first 50 rows for free and then demand a subscription that's deliberately hard to cancel. A quick look at the Web Store reviews is almost always worth it.

Method 4: Follower export tool – download lists as CSV

The most convenient route is a dedicated follower export tool that works server-side – no extension in your browser, no access to your private session. The smartFollower Scraper Bot reads out follower and following lists and serves them to you as a CSV file, ready to download. The crucial difference from Instagram's built-in export: it works not just for your own account, but for any public account – for example to study a competitor's followers as a target audience.

And each row gives you a lot more than just the username: name, bio and follower count come right in the CSV. Those fields are exactly what turns a bare list of names into a table you can filter, sort and prioritize.

Analyzing your follower list in Excel: three practical recipes

The best way to open a CSV file in Excel is Data → 'From Text/CSV', choosing UTF-8 as the encoding – otherwise special characters and emojis in the bios get mangled. After that, the list becomes genuinely useful:

• Remove duplicates: If you merge several exports (say, the followers of three competitor accounts), Data → Remove Duplicates on the username column cleans things up in seconds.
• Filter by bio keywords: A 'contains' text filter on the bio column – say 'coach', 'shop' or your city – turns a list of 10,000 into the 300 accounts that are actually relevant for your outreach.
• Compare two exports: Export the same follower list two weeks apart and match them with VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP. Usernames that appear in the old export but are missing from the new one are your unfollowers – the cleanest method, no extra app required.

If you need this kind of analysis regularly, it's worth looking at Instagram analytics tools: they track follower growth and engagement rate automatically, instead of you diffing CSVs against each other every week.

The legal side: what GDPR and Instagram's rules say

A quick overview – without any claim to replace legal advice:

• Reading public data is not hacking: Retrieving profile data that anyone can see anyway does not mean gaining unauthorized access to someone else's account. Scraping public lists is fundamentally different from breaking into private accounts.
• GDPR still applies: Under EU law, usernames, names and bios are personal data. That means purpose limitation (use the list only for the purpose you collected it for), no sharing or selling of the data – and a deletion plan: get rid of it as soon as the purpose is fulfilled.
• Instagram's terms of use: Instagram takes a dim view of automated data collection and can restrict accounts that generate a conspicuous number of requests. Reputable tools deliberately throttle their pace and stay within the usual limits – so a somewhat longer export time is a good sign, not a bad one.

For privately comparing your own followers, none of this is a problem. As soon as you use exported lists for marketing, the usual rules for first contact come into play – more on that in the guide to Instagram cold outreach.

Conclusion: the right method depends on your goal

For a simple backup of your own followers, the official data export is enough – free and safe, just slow and without a usable spreadsheet format. As soon as you want more than a list of names – unfollower comparisons, audience research on competitors or filtered outreach lists – there's hardly a way around a real export tool. The Scraper Bot delivers the CSV with all the relevant profile fields, and Excel does the rest. And whatever you plan to do with the data: define the purpose, share nothing, delete it when you're done – and you're on the right side of GDPR too.