01
The short answer
A mutual follower is an account that follows you and that you also follow back.
You → follow them.
They → follow you.
In Social Janitor, these accounts appear in the Mutual group because they exist in both your Followers and Following data.
02
What “mutual” means on Instagram
Mutual simply means the follow relationship goes in both directions. The account is present in your Followers list because it follows you, and it is present in your Following list because you follow it.
This is different from Following only, where you follow the account but it does not follow you back, and Followers only, where the account follows you but you do not follow it.
For the full relationship breakdown, see Instagram Followers vs Following.
03
How mutual followers are calculated
Mutual accounts are found by comparing the actual account records in Followers with the records in Following.
Followers ∩ Following = Mutual.
In plain language, the Mutual list contains the accounts that appear in both sets.
This is why the Mutual count is included inside both your total Followers count and your total Following count. Mutual accounts are not a separate third population outside those totals.
04
A simple example
Imagine your export contains:
- Followers: Alex, Jamie, Morgan, Casey
- Following: Jamie, Morgan, Taylor
Jamie and Morgan appear in both lists, so they are Mutual.
- Mutual: Jamie, Morgan
- Followers only: Alex, Casey
- Following only: Taylor
That same comparison works no matter whether your account has a few dozen relationships or several thousand.
05
How mutuals affect your follower and following counts
Mutual accounts are counted once in Followers and once in Following because they belong to both lists.
For example, if you have 1,000 Followers and 800 Following, you cannot work out the number of one-way relationships from those two totals alone. You also need to know how many accounts appear in both lists.
If 600 accounts are Mutual, then 400 are Followers only and 200 are Following only.
This is why comparing the underlying lists gives you more useful information than looking at the headline totals.
07
What to check next
Once you understand Mutual, the two one-way relationship groups are usually the most interesting next step.
- Learn what Following only means if you want to understand accounts you follow that do not follow you back.
- Learn what Followers only means if you want to find accounts that follow you while you do not follow them.
- See how to identify actual unfollowers between snapshots if you want to track changes over time.
Explore example results to see how Followers, Following, Mutual and one-way relationships fit together.
06
Find your mutual connections with Social Janitor
Social Janitor reads the follower and following records from your Instagram export and separates the accounts into Mutual, Following only and Followers only groups.
That gives you a clearer picture of your relationships without manually comparing usernames across two long lists.
Open the free preview with your Instagram export and inspect the relationship groups without sharing your Instagram password.