What brands check on your Instagram before they reach out

Instagram has the most mature brand-partnership playbook of any platform, which means brands checking your account usually run through a fairly consistent list before reaching out.

What they check

Engagement rate relative to follower count, calculated roughly the way you'd expect — but brands doing real diligence look at your rate across your last 10-20 posts, not your single best-performing one, since anyone can cherry-pick a highlight.

Audience demographics, if visible. Many brands specifically want to know if your audience matches their customer profile geographically and by age — a large following that's the wrong age range or wrong country for the product is often worth less to a brand than a smaller, well-matched one.

A brand is rarely chasing your biggest number — they're checking whether your specific audience overlaps with their specific customer, and a smaller well-matched account often wins that comparison.

What else factors in

• Content consistency and quality, meaning does your feed look like it represents a real, sustained point of view rather than a scattered mix — brands are picturing their product sitting inside your existing content, and that's harder to picture on an inconsistent feed.
• Past brand work, if any, both to gauge how you handle sponsored content and to see whether you've worked with anything adjacent or competitive recently.
• Story activity, which many brands check specifically because Stories reveal day-to-day authenticity in a way the curated feed doesn't — an account that's active and personable in Stories reads as lower-risk for a partnership.

What to do about it

Keep a simple one-page media kit ready with your engagement rate, rough audience breakdown if you have access to it, and 2-3 examples of your best content — this saves you from scrambling when a brand actually reaches out and shows you take partnerships seriously before you've even negotiated anything.