Although Instagram allows you to view the accounts other people follow, they don’t make it easy to find out when exactly each person was followed.
So, if you want to know when someone started following someone else, it can be a little challenging.
Thankfully, there are tactics and tools available that will allow you to figure out the exact date an account was followed – whether it was by you or someone else!
In this article, we’ll cover everything that you need to know.
1. Examine Their Following List
The first thing you should do is to examine their following list.
Whether you’re looking at your own account or someone else’s, Instagram will always show the people that you followed most recently first. This is important fact to keep note of, as it it will also be used for another tactic mentioned later.
Anyhow, visit the person’s profile you’re wanting to find more information on. Then, scroll down until you find the person that they’ve followed.
If you happen to know an approximate date for when they followed the accounts surrounding this one (before or after), you can use this to estimate when the account was followed by that person.
If this person follows accounts fairly consistently, you can expect this approximation to be quite accurate. However, if this person tends to follow in batches or only follows new accounts sporadically, it can be hard to pinpoint the exact date someone was followed.
Thankfully, there are other tools and tactics you can use alongside this one in order to gain a better idea.
Let’s look over the next one now.
2. Look For Activity On That Person’s Page
The next thing you should do would be to look for activity on that person’s page. This is much easier if you are following the person whose activity you’re trying to track.
Visit the profile your friend is following, and scroll through their posts, going backwards. Make sure you actually open each one up, so Instagram will show you some of the accounts that have liked each post.
Instagram will always show you people that you know, first. This means that if you’re following your friend, you will be able to see when they’ve liked one of their posts.
People tend to follow accounts shortly after being exposed to their posts, rather than coming back to follow them later.
This means you can keep scrolling until you find the oldest post that your friend has liked from that account.
This will give you a good estimation on when they chose to follow them.
3. Use SocialBlade (Free)
Lastly, one of the most effective things you can do is to use a free tool called SocialBlade. This one will be able to give you the exact date an account was followed, and can be used to more accurately track an account’s activity.
This is because it shows stats on when new accounts were followed, as well as tracking the follower growth of other pages.
Because we know that Instagram shows the accounts you followed most recently first, you can use this and then count backwards to find the exact date an account was followed. This is best illustrated with an example.
Let’s say that you pull up your friend’s following list, and count backwards. You want to find out when they followed the 15th person on that list.
Using SocialBlade, you can then look at the ‘Following’ stats, you can then add up backwards until you get to 15. In this example, we then know almost for certain that the account was followed on May 1st.
There still can be some discrepancy (for example, if accounts were unfollowed during this time period), however this is unlikely.
Therefore, this free tool can be used to find out with reasonable certainty the exact date an account was followed. You can use it to find out when you followed someone on Instagram, or another account entirely.
Note that if the person you’re tracking has a private Instagram account, SocialBlade will not be able to pull up any information. In these instances, you should instead search for the account they’re following, and look at the ‘Followers’ tab instead – counting backwards until you find what date your friend followed them. This can be tricky if the account receives a large number of follows each day.
Of course, on some occasions SocialBlade isn’t yet tracking an account.
Therefore, you may wish to use a dedicated tool for monitoring Instagram activity, such as Snoopreport.
Conclusion
Thankfully, it’s possible to find out the date someone followed an account on Instagram. However, depending on the exact tactic used, you may only be able to get an estimation, rather than a concrete answer.
I hope that you’ve found this article helpful. If you have any other questions about Instagram, please ask them using the comment form below.
Wishing you the best,
– James McAllister