Exploring Instagram Growth Metrics with Python

An exploratory data analysis of Instagram account growth within three niches

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

Introduction

You may not know it by reading my articles, but I’ve been an Instagram content creator for three years. And like most who have attempted to grow an audience on Instagram, I’ve gone down various rabbit holes in search of the secrets to Instagram growth.

Many of these secrets emanated from a strange corner of Instagram where marketing coaches coach marketers who want to sell coaching to yet more marketers who want to repeat the cycle. But after trying their advice, I saw that Instagram growth is more complicated than posting daily, asking questions in your comments to increase engagement, building the “like, know, trust” factor, or any other hack.

So I decided to use my data analysis skills to see if turning to the data would unlock the keys to Instagram growth.

I tracked follower and post counts for 12 Instagram profiles over a month to do this. Here I’ll walk through the Python code I used to wrangle the data and share my perspective on what implications the numbers have for Instagram content creators looking to increase their follower counts.