So you’re wondering who is spying on your Instagram account and want to track them down? If you’re worried about who is stalking your Instagram profile and want to know whether it’s possible to see them or not, you’ve landed on the right article, because in this post we’ll explain it all for you and we’ll share some possible solutions that will help you protect your Instagram privacy.
Finding who viewed your Instagram profile comes with some benefits especially for businesses, uncovering your visitors will help you target the right audience and grow your business, and even as a personal account holder, you’ll be able to know who is spying on your profile like friends and family members or even your haters. Yes, your haters are always spying on your social media profiles so that they can find a way to attack you online.
So whatever your reason is for wanting to know who has viewed your Instagram profile is, you have the right to know them. The most important question now is; is it even possible to know exactly who viewed your Instagram profile? That’s the first question we’ll address in this article, so keep reading to explore more.
Can You See Instagram Users That Visited Your Profile?
I know you’re eager to hear a yes from this post, but sadly the answer to this question is NO, Instagram doesn’t have any feature at the moment that allow users to view who’s spying on their Instagram profile. You can though view some statistics on your followers like the number of people that read your posts in their feed and so on, we’ll talk about that later in this article.
Instagram has kept it tight and no one knows why; maybe for privacy concerns. But one thing is sure, Instagram has this data, they just decide not to make it public. Hopefully, they might integrate this feature in the coming updates, but it’s not coming soon. So another important question we’ll like to answer is, do apps work? Let’s answer that in the next section.
Can You See Who Viewed Your Instagram Profile Using Apps?
You should get ready for disappointment on this one also because the answer is still No. When you search for ‘How to See Who Viewed Your Instagram Profile’ online, you’ll come across apps that promise to provide such data or you’ll find pages that list top 10 apps that allow you to see who viewed your Instagram account.
Likewise, if you also search on google play or apps store for iOS, you’ll also get endless options promising to give you data on who has viewed your Instagram profile, and the sad part of it is that they manage to provide false data.
The information provided by these apps isn’t accurate, they just pull out random users from your followers or other accounts and display them to you as the users that have viewed your Instagram profile.
You see the thing is that every Instagram app out there uses data provided by Instagram through API or I can say they pull information from the Instagram database, any information that’s kept private by Instagram can’t be accessed by any app, so since Instagram has already made it private when it comes seeing your profile visitors, how can such apps get access to this kind of information? I bet you now understand the whole process.
Don’t even think of investing your money on any app that promises to show you who’s viewing your Instagram profile. Avoid even the free ones because you’ll end up with annoying ads or might slow down your phone. Even worse they can crash your Instagram app because once you install such apps they’ll be permitted to get data from your account.
So by now, you should understand that Instagram API doesn’t provide such information to any app. If you’ve ever installed an app and have provided permissions, the first thing you want to do now is to cancel their permission or we strongly recommend you delete the app from your phone, these apps are controlling your data and are affecting the performance of your phone.
Is There Any Alternative?
If you still insist on viewing the users that engage with some of your activities, you can do that with stories. You can view a lot more data on stories than your posts, provided you’ve made them public. All you have to do is open the story and swipe up and you’ll notice eyeball symbol, tap on that, you’ll be shown the number of users that viewed that story. You’ll also be able to see those that are not following your account.
Now that you’ve understood you can’t see the names of users who viewed your Instagram profile, let’s now move on to share the data you can see from your visitors. Here is a list of data you’ll be able to see on your Instagram account and posts;
- View the number of people that visited your profile.
- The number of people that have seen your posts.
- The best performing posts.
- The number of people that have saved your photos and videos.
- Times when your followers are more active.
This is the data you have access on your Instagram account and some of these features are not even available to personal or I can say normal account. You first have to upgrade to a business account, anybody can upgrade to business account regardless of whether they own a business or not. We’ll share with you how to upgrade to an Instagram business account and how to check some of the data we’ve mentioned earlier.
Upgrading Your Instagram Account To Business
It’s a pretty simple process and just a few steps are required and here we go;
- Go to options on your Instagram app.
- Select ‘Switch to business profile’ from the menu.
How to See Who Viewed Your Instagram Profile
- In the next step, you’ll be asked to connect your Facebook page, all the data from your Facebook page will be added to your Instagram profile. So you’ll want to change any information on your Facebook page you don’t want to be linked to your Instagram profile. Even if you don’t have a Facebook page, you can create one within a couple of minutes. And also, you can skip adding your Facebook page if you don’t want to.
- Then you’ll be asked to add phone number and email, for this step you can also choose to add only your Email without adding the phone number.
- Once you do this, you’ve now upgraded your account to Instagram business.
So now that you have a business account let’s share how to see data on your profile and followers.
How To View The Number Of Users That Visited Your Profile
First of all, you won’t be able to see the number of people that visited your profile immediately after upgrading to a business account. This data is only available after seven days and that’s because Instagram shows the number of profile visitors for the last seven days.
You don’t need to follow any step to get this info, the stat will be displayed on your profile. Here is a screenshot as a sample;
Can you see who views your Instagram profile
When you click on the number, you’ll get more insight, like the days that have the maximum number within the week, it’s shown in graphical form, not numbers though.
The comparison also will be displayed, whether the visitors have increased from the previous week or have reduced. If reduced, a minus sign will be added before the figure or positive sign if users have increased.
You can also view other info on the screen like the number of accounts reached and more.
How To View Your Top Posts
This stat can be seen for both Instagram stories and posts.
- Click on ‘Insights’ and select ‘Content’.
- To view your posts, click on ‘See All’ which is under ‘Posts’.
- All posts will be displayed for the past year and will be listed from top-performing to least performing ones.
- You can see from the message displayed, they’re sorted by impressions, that’s posts with the most impressions to posts with least impression.
How To Check Users That Saved Your Pictures
Instagram allows users to check insights for published photos. Here is how to do that;
- Log into your account and click on the picture you want to view the insight.
- You’ll notice a tiny bookmark icon which is displayed by the right side, there is a number next to it, that’s the number of people that have saved your photos.
How to view users that viewed your Instagram Story and video
When it comes to stories, you can see the list of users that watched your stories. But the time is limited, you can only view this data within 24 hours of sharing your story and your account must be public. All users that viewed your story or video will be listed. After 24 hours you’ll only be able to see the number without listing the users as we’ve mentioned in earlier steps.
Can You See Who Viewed Your Instagram Posts?
That’s also not possible, no stat on Instagram can list down the names of users that viewed your posts. You should also never trust any third-party app that promise to provide such data.
Is There Any Alternative To Block Users From Viewing Your Activities?
Yes, first of all, you can block any user from viewing your Instagram account, but whenever you block a user, you cannot view their activities as well, and they’ll understand that you’ve blocked them because whenever they tried to view your posts, they will not be given access. But blocking users from viewing you your posts isn’t the way out, users can create a separate account with a different name and keep spying on your activities. That’s why you need to find another way to protect your privacy.
We suggest if you’re looking for full privacy you should go for option two and that’s setting your account as private, this way you provide access to only your followers or certain people. With a private account, you have full control on who can interact with you, right from viewing your profile to seeing your posts and other activities.
Here is how to set your account as private;
- Log into the Instagram app and tap on your profile icon which is on the lower menu of the app.
- On your profile page, tap on the gear icon on top of the right screen which will open settings.
- In the settings menu, ‘Account option’ will be listed half-way, tap on it and you’ll see the option ‘Private Account’
- Swipe the button to the right to enable the private account.
- With this feature, only your followers can view your account activities, and secondly, users can’t follow you automatically, they’ll have to be approved by you first. It’s a manual process though when you receive a lot of the following request it will take some time to approve them.
Should You Set Your Account As Private?
I believe it’s not recommended for business accounts and public figures to set their account as private if you belong to any of these it can be tiresome to approve users that can view your profile and other activities. But for those that are operating normal or personal Instagram accounts, there is nothing wrong with setting your account as private.
After setting up your account as private you have to be careful on your followers, do not approve anyone you don’t fully know, because some of the people you don’t want to follow will disguise as someone else so that you can approve them and they’ll end up spying on your account without knowing it.
So that’s it for the article, you’ve now fully understood how privacy work on Instagram, you know the type of data that’s available to users and the data that’s not accessible whether through API or on your profile.
Whatever reason you might have, you can always decide on who can view your profile activates and even if your account is set public you can decide to block them.
Thank you for reading and please don’t forget to share your opinions in the comment section if you have some ideas to share or if you have some Instagram tricks you would like to share with our readers that’s related to this post.
