How To Find Out Who Your Most Valuable Instagram Follower Is

It feels a little weird to give superlatives to your social media followers. But, knowing who your "Most Valuable Follower" (or #MVF) is can actually be useful in establishing what type of audience you appeal to, and how to improve on that. Today, SocialRank, which has been offering follower analytics for Twitter, is launching the same suite of tools for Instagram.

SocialRank is an
easy-to-use service that helps people and brands analyze their followers
using keywords and filters. You can organize your followers by: “Most Valuable”
(an algorithmic approximation of social influence); “Most Engaged” (who has
interacted with you the most in recent history); “Most Followed” (what it sounds
like); and “Best Follower” (a composite of your Most Engaged and Most Valuable
followers). You can also filter by whether your followers use specific keywords or hashtags in their posts, biographies, or locations.     

Knowing who your followers really are can lead to anything from puppy playdates to useful business meetings. “There are no good Instagram audience-understanding tools,” says SocialRank’s founder Alexander Taub, who's the proud owner of a charming Havanese pup named Bart. “There is no place I can go right now and find 100 people — that follow me on Instagram, that live in NYC, and use the hashtag #dog — that I can connect with.”      While Taub clearly wants to have some sort of epic puppy party with his followers (hey, to each his own), the rest of us may find that SocialRank is useful for refreshing our perspectives on social networking — and for reorganizing our established networks.

SocialRank on Instagram feels like a more organic (and visual) LinkedIn.
For example, while looking for an artist to collaborate with on a special
project, we popped open SocialRank and set the keyword search to “artist” and the location to NYC. Turns out, we have 32 followers who list themselves as
artists living in New York. Useful!       

Figuring out your #MVF and #MEF may inspire awkward feelings of high-school popularity contests, but when you come to terms with this service's sheer utility, you start to get over those 2003 flashbacks.