How to Export Your Instagram Following List to a Spreadsheet

Your Instagram following list — everyone you follow — is surprisingly useful data once it's out of the app and in a spreadsheet. You can audit it, clean it up, back it up, or compare it against your followers. But like the followers list, Instagram gives you no export button. Here's how to get it out.

Why bother exporting who you follow

• Find non-followers — compare it to your followers list to see who doesn't follow you back.
• Spot inactive or dead accounts you're still following.
• Clean up — a sortable list makes it obvious who to unfollow.
• Backup — if your account is ever locked or lost, you have a record of your network.

Scrolling the list inside Instagram gives you none of this: you can't sort it, search it properly, or save it.

The manual option

Instagram's official "Download your information" export includes a following file, but it's slow to generate and arrives as raw JSON/HTML — no full names, no clickable profile links, not sorted, and awkward to open in a spreadsheet. Fine for compliance, poor for actually working with the data.

The one-click method

IG Follower Extractor exports your entire following list to CSV or a real Excel file in one click. Each row includes the username, full name, profile URL, user ID, and private/verified flags — so you can sort and filter immediately. Open the extension, choose Export Following, and it pages through the whole list in your own browser session and hands you the file. It'll also preview the first 100 rows first so you can sanity-check before downloading.

Step by step

1. Install IG Follower Extractor and make sure you're logged in to Instagram.
2. Open it and click Use my account (or enter any public handle).
3. Choose Export Following.
4. Let the progress bar finish, then click Download Excel or Download CSV.

Quick answers

• Can I export the following list of another account? Yes, if it's public. Private accounts you don't follow aren't accessible.
• What's the difference from the followers export? Followers = people who follow you; following = people you follow. The extension does both, plus the comparison between them.
• Does it change anything on my account? No — it only reads. It doesn't follow, unfollow, or post anything.
• Free? Yes.