I Checked Who Unfollowed Me on Instagram for 30 Days — Here's What I Found
I Checked Who Unfollowed Me on Instagram for 30 Days — Here's What I Found
I'll be upfront about something: I started this experiment partly out of vanity. My follower count had been drifting down by 10–20 accounts per week for about two months, and I wanted to know who was leaving and why.
So I committed to tracking it properly for a full month. No apps, no guessing. Just Instagram's official data export, uploaded to FollowCheck twice a week, with notes on what I had posted between each export.
Here's what actually happened.
Week 1: The Bots Are Real
I took my first export on a Sunday, uploaded it to FollowCheck, and saved the results. Took a second export on Wednesday. The comparison showed 14 accounts that had unfollowed me in those three days.
I went through all 14 individually. Nine of them had either been deleted (profile returned a 404) or had usernames consisting of random character strings with no posts. Classic bot cleanup. Instagram had purged them.
The other five were real accounts. Two were people I vaguely recognized from years ago — accounts I'd followed back during a follow-back campaign in 2022. The other three I'd never interacted with and couldn't place.
None of them were people who had ever commented on my posts or replied to my Stories. This was the first useful data point: the people leaving weren't my engaged community. They were the periphery.
Week 2: The Post-Content Drift
Midway through week two, I posted something slightly outside my usual niche — more personal than I normally share. It performed well in terms of likes and comments. But FollowCheck showed eight unfollows in the 48 hours after that post.
Were they directly connected? I can't prove causality. But the timing was notable. When I looked at those eight accounts, they were all accounts that had been following me for over a year with almost no visible engagement history in my content. The personal post may have clarified my content direction and reminded them why they weren't particularly invested.
Or it was coincidence. That's the honest limitation of this kind of analysis — correlation isn't causation.
Week 3: Almost Nothing
Week three was quiet. I posted consistently, nothing unusual. The Wednesday export showed four unfollows, all bot accounts. The Sunday export showed six, mix of bots and a couple of accounts that had deactivated (profiles unreachable).
The total loss for the week was practically zero in terms of real followers. This was a useful calibration. A "normal" week for my account size and posting frequency involves roughly 5–10 apparent unfollows, 90% of which are bots or deletions.
Week 4: The Follow-Unfollow Pattern Became Obvious
In the final week, I noticed something I'd suspected but hadn't confirmed. Three accounts that had followed me early in the month appeared in my unfollowers list at the end. When I looked at their profiles, they were following 3,000–4,000 accounts with only 200–400 followers themselves. Textbook follow-unfollow behavior.
They had followed me, waited for a follow-back (I don't follow back automatically), and unfollowed after getting none. This pattern — follow and then unfollow within 3–4 weeks — showed up at least five times across the month.
What the 30 Days Actually Told Me
Total unfollows identified: 61 Bots/deleted accounts: ~38 (62%) Follow-unfollow accounts: ~11 (18%) Accounts that were real, possibly content-related departures: ~12 (20%)
Of that 20% — the 12 accounts that were real people who may have actively chosen to leave — none of them were accounts that had ever engaged with my content. Not one comment, not one DM reply, not one Story reaction in their history.
The followers who actually care about what I post? They stayed. Every one of them.
The Practical Takeaway
Run FollowCheck on your account. Seriously. The numbers that feel alarming — your follower count slowly ticking down — are almost always dominated by bots and inactive accounts the platform is cleaning up, plus people who were never actually part of your community.
Download your Instagram export (Settings → Accounts Center → Download Your Information, JSON format), upload it to followcheck.tech, save the results, and compare again in a few weeks. Do it twice. Then you have real data instead of anxiety-inducing speculation.
What I found was reassuring. My real community wasn't eroding. The bots were just leaving. That's actually good news.