Open your Tumblr settings and you'll find a follower count. One number. It was there yesterday too, but you don't remember what it said, and Tumblr certainly isn't going to remind you.
So when a post takes off and you feel like it brought in a wave of new followers, you have no way to check. Was it 200 people or 20? Did they stick around a week later? Was last month better or worse than the one before it? The number that would answer all of this is the one number Tumblr refuses to keep.
This post covers how to track your Tumblr follower growth over time starting from scratch: the manual method that costs nothing, how to read a growth rate instead of a raw total, and how to trace a spike back to the post that actually caused it.
What Tumblr gives you (and what it doesn't)
Your follower count lives in your blog settings, and that's the whole feature. It's a live total with no memory attached.
The Activity page is the closest thing to a follower feed. It shows new followers as they arrive, mixed in with reblogs, likes, and replies, on a rolling window that maxes out at a month. It's fine for noticing that people are following you right now. It's useless for answering "how did June compare to May," because by the time you ask, June is gone.
Three things are missing, and they're the three that matter:
- History. No chart, no archive, no way to see what the number was on any past date.
- Net change. You see the total, not the gain. If you picked up 180 followers and lost 60, Tumblr shows you +120 and never mentions the churn.
- Attribution. Nothing connects a follower bump to the post that drove it.
If you want the full picture of what Tumblr does and doesn't measure, we broke it down in does Tumblr have analytics. For followers specifically, the short version is: you're on your own, and the fix is to start keeping the record yourself.
Start the log tonight (the free method)
The whole manual method is one spreadsheet with three columns. It takes about ninety seconds a week.
Date | Followers | Notes
2026-07-06 | 3,120 | quiet week
2026-07-13 | 3,164 | posted the art dump on the 11th
Pick a day — Sunday night, Monday morning, whatever you'll actually remember — and log the count on that day every week. Add a short note about anything unusual you posted. That's it.
The reason to start now rather than "when I have time" is that this data can only be collected going forward. You cannot reconstruct your follower count from three months ago; nobody has it. Every week you don't log is a permanent hole in the chart. A boring spreadsheet started tonight beats a perfect system started in September.
After four entries you have something Tumblr has never shown you: a line. After twelve you can see a trend, and trends are where the actual decisions live.
Read the rate, not the total
Here's the mistake almost everyone makes: they watch the total go up and feel good about it. The total is the least informative number in the sheet.
What you want is the weekly growth rate — new followers as a percentage of the followers you already had:
growth rate = (this week − last week) ÷ last week × 100
Say you gained 40 followers this week. On a blog with 800 followers, that's 5% growth, which is a genuinely strong week. On a blog with 8,000 followers, the same 40 people are 0.5%, which is close to flat. Identical raw number, completely different story. Only the rate tells you which one you're living in.
Two things fall out of this once you're tracking it:
Growth decelerates as you get bigger, and that's normal. Holding a steady percentage gets harder every month, because the denominator keeps growing. Judging your 5,000-follower self against the raw weekly gains of your 500-follower self will make you feel like you're failing when you aren't.
Flat is a signal, not a plateau to wait out. If your rate has sat near zero for six weeks, more posting at the same cadence won't fix it. Something about the content, the tags, or the timing is the constraint. That's a conclusion you can only reach by looking at six weeks of data at once, which is exactly what Tumblr won't let you do.
Tie the spike to the post that caused it
The most useful thing a follower log unlocks is attribution. You see a jump, and now you can go find out why.
Say your log shows +180 in a week when you normally get +30. Work backwards:
1. Narrow the window. A weekly log tells you the week; the Activity feed tells you the days. Check it while the spike is still inside the rolling window, because once it ages out you've lost the timing detail for good.
2. Find the candidate post. Look at what you published in the few days before the bump and pull the note counts. One post is usually well clear of the others.
3. Get the actual timestamp. Tumblr only shows "5 days ago," which is useless for lining a post up against a follower bump. Paste the post URL into our free Tumblr post date finder to get the exact publish date and hour, accurate to the second. Now you can check whether the followers arrived after the post went live, or whether the post just happened to land in the same week as something else.
4. Check the ratio, not just the notes. A post with 900 notes that's mostly likes stayed inside your existing audience. A post with 300 notes that's heavily reblogged travelled to dashboards that had never seen you. The second one is what brings followers. High-reblog posts are the ones worth studying and repeating.
5. Come back in two weeks. Spike followers are the flakiest followers you'll ever get. A lot of them followed on impulse and drift away. If your count holds after a fortnight, the post found you real audience. If it sags back, you got a moment, not a community. Both are worth knowing, and only the log can tell you which happened.
Do this three or four times and you stop guessing about what grows your blog. You start recognising the shape of a post that actually converts strangers into followers.
Or let the snapshots take themselves
The spreadsheet works. I'd genuinely rather you keep one than keep nothing. The catch is that it only works if you never forget, and the data is unrecoverable when you do. Miss three weeks in a busy month and there's no going back to fill them in.
We built Rebloq to remove that failure mode. It records a profile snapshot automatically on a schedule, so your follower history charts itself from the day you connect a blog and keeps going indefinitely — no weekly reminder, no gaps, no memory required. It tracks note counts and the reblog-to-like ratio on every post at the same time, so when you see a spike in the growth chart, the post that caused it is right there next to it instead of being something you have to reconstruct by hand.
The manual method and the automatic one produce the same insight. One of them just doesn't depend on you remembering.
Quick answers
Does Tumblr show follower history? No. Tumblr shows your current follower total and nothing else. There's no chart, no daily change, and no archive of what the number was last week or last year.
Can I see who unfollowed me on Tumblr? No. Tumblr reports new followers in the Activity feed but never reports unfollows, and no third-party tool can reliably detect them either. The Tumblr API doesn't expose it, so any tool claiming otherwise is guessing.
How often should I log my follower count? Weekly is enough for most blogs. Daily only helps if you're actively chasing a spike and want to see how long it lasts before it decays.
Why did my follower count go down? Normal churn, plus Tumblr periodically purging spam and deactivated blogs. A small decline after a growth spike is expected — a lot of spike followers are passive and drift off.
Start the chart
Tumblr will show you one number, today, forever. Everything interesting about that number — the rate, the trend, the spikes, the posts behind them — lives in the history, and the history only exists if somebody keeps it.
So keep it. Open a spreadsheet tonight, write today's date and today's count, and put a weekly reminder in your phone. In three months you'll have something you can actually reason about, and you'll be making decisions on evidence while most blogs are still running on vibes. Pair it with your best posting hours and you've got the two levers that matter most.
If you'd rather not depend on remembering, Rebloq has a free 7-day trial and starts charting your follower growth from the first day you connect a blog. Either way, start the record now — the week you skip is the week you can never get back.