Your contact list grows automatically as people interact with your Instagram account. You don't import a CSV or add anyone by hand. This article explains every way a contact gets created and what information comes with them.

A contact is created the first time someone interacts with your Instagram account through a channel Inrō monitors. Each of these creates a new contact record if one doesn't already exist for that Instagram user:

In all of these, Inrō pulls the person's public Instagram profile data automatically: username, display name, profile picture, follower count, and bio.

When you first connect your account, Inrō also imports your recent Instagram conversation history (about six months back), so people you've already talked to show up as contacts right away, not only from your next interaction with them.

Some Instagram interactions don't create a contact, because Instagram's API doesn't treat them as conversation starters:

So if someone only follows you and never messages, comments, or interacts through one of the channels above, they won't appear in your contacts. This is the single most common reason your contact count is lower than your follower count. See Why Do I Have Fewer Contacts Than Followers? for the full explanation.

You can't bulk-import contacts from a spreadsheet or another CRM into Inrō. Inrō can only message people who have already opened a conversation with your account.

What you can do is sync existing contact data between Inrō and external tools with the Make integration or the Inrō API. This pushes information like emails, custom properties, or folder membership back and forth. It works only with contacts already in Inrō, not to create new ones.

Every contact gets a profile with two kinds of information.

Pulled from Instagram at first contact: username, display name, profile picture, follower count, bio, and whether they follow you. This reflects their profile at the time of first interaction and may not update if they change it later.

Collected over time: email, phone number, and any custom properties you've set up. These get filled in through scenario actions (like "Ask a question" or "Update contact property"), AI Agent data collection that reads information from the conversation, or manual entry by your team.

For more on managing and customising contact data, see Contact Profiles & Custom Properties.

Capturing a contact doesn't cost anything: there's no per-contact charge for the people Inrō saves from your interactions.

Cost applies only when a contact becomes activated in a given month. That happens when they trigger a scenario, receive a campaign, or interact with your AI Agent. Creating a contact and activating a contact are two separate things. For the full breakdown of the billing unit, see What Are Activated Contacts?.

⚠️ Your plan may set a ceiling on how many contacts you can store (the free plan caps total contacts). The current limit for your plan is shown in your billing settings.

Once contacts are in Inrō, the main way to organise them is with folders: custom labels like "Hot Leads," "Customers," or "VIPs" that you assign to contacts by hand or automatically through scenarios.

A contact can be in several folders at once, and adding a contact to a folder can trigger a scenario, so folders work as both an organising tool and an automation trigger. See Folders: Create, Organise & Automate for the full guide.

To build detailed profiles for your contacts, see Contact Profiles & Custom Properties. To start organising contacts into targetable groups, see Folders: Create, Organise & Automate.