What Every Column in Your Instagram Follower Export Means

Open a follower export and you get a handful of columns. Here's what each one actually is, how much to trust it, and why the interesting-looking fields are usually empty.

The columns in every export

username — the @handle, without the @. This is what you use to find someone, and it's the field most tools key on. One catch: usernames can be changed. If you're comparing two exports taken months apart, someone who renamed their account will look like they left and a new person joined.

full_name — the display name a user sets in their profile. It's free text, it's optional, and a large share of accounts leave it blank or set it to something unhelpful ("🦋", a business tagline, an emoji string). Fine for skimming a list to recognise people; don't use it for matching or deduplication.

user_id (sometimes pk or id) — a permanent numeric identifier Instagram assigns when the account is created. Unlike the username, it never changes. If you plan to compare exports over time — tracking who unfollowed, who's new — this is the column to match on, not the username. It's also roughly chronological: lower IDs are older accounts.

is_private — whether that follower's own account was private at the moment you exported. A point-in-time snapshot; someone can flip it the next day. Useful as a filter (e.g. "which of my followers are businesses" tends to correlate with public).

is_verified — the blue check, as of export time. Same caveat: verification is granted and removed, so an old export's flags can be stale.

profile_url — just https://instagram.com/username. It carries no information the username doesn't; it's there so you can click straight through from a spreadsheet. If your tool omits it, you can build it yourself with ="https://instagram.com/"&A2.

The columns that need a separate lookup

The basic follower list does not include bios or contact details. Those live on each individual profile, so a tool has to fetch every profile one by one — slower, and more rate-limit expensive. Tools call this mode "detailed lookup" or "enrichment," and it's typically a paid feature because it costs real request budget.

When you do run it, expect:

biography — the bio text. Present on most active accounts. Genuinely useful for filtering an audience by keyword.

category — the business/creator category label ("Digital creator", "Clothing store"). Only on accounts that set up a professional profile.

public_email, public_phone, external_url — the contact button fields on a business or creator profile. This is the part everyone over-expects. Personal accounts have none of these. Only business and creator accounts have a contact button, and only if the owner filled it in. On a general follower list, a fill rate of 5–20% is normal; a niche B2B audience might hit 40%. A tool promising "email for every follower" is not being honest about how Instagram works.

ListLift's detailed lookup states this yield openly on the results screen rather than implying every row will have contact data. See ListLift.

Putting it together