Similar to Facebook and Twitter, you can create an account and post photos and videos to update your feed for everyone else to feed. Depending on who and how many people you follow, your feed can leave you scrolling for hours. The content that you post will be displayed on your feed and your follower’s feed. Here they’ll be able to like, comment, share, save, and DM your post to others. Your experience on Instagram depends on who you follow and the amount of content on your feed, although many people’s Instagram experience is based on the explore page due to the amount of content on there. When you follow someone, you’ll be able to see how many Followers and Followings they have, their highlights, the posts that they’ve previously uploaded, and their current stories. If you’ve had Instagram for a while, then you’ve probably followed a ton of people. This could be celebs, friends & family, or people you just admire.
Can You See How Long You’ve Been Following Someone on Instagram?
Unfortunately, there’s no way to check the exact date that you followed someone on Instagram to see how long you’ve been following them. Instagram doesn’t provide this information anywhere and they see no reason for why this information is useful which is why there’s nowhere to find this. Unlike Facebook, you can see when you started to become friends with someone. That’s because Facebook started off as a relationship-driven platform, whereas Instagram has primarily been based on content. You can see the chronological order of when you followed people, but this wouldn’t give you the date you followed them. If you want to do this, go to the Following tab, tap on Sort by Default, and check how you want the list to be other. If you chose earliest, it would show who you followed first in chronological order. If you check the Latest, it will show you who you followed recently in chronological order. Before, Instagram had an activity tab that will allow you to see people’s activity such as what they’ve liked, commented on, and who they’re following. Here, it also provided a date when this all happened. Using this, you could also see when you followed someone. Unfortunately, this feature is no longer available.
How to See When You Started Following Someone on Instagram
There are subtle ways that you can use to try and check when someone followed you. This isn’t perfect but it can give you a specific yes, in most cases month, and in rare cases the exact date so it’s worth a try
Scrolling Up to Your First Message With Each Other
If you guys have been friends recently, chances are you’ve messaged each other. You can scroll up to the top of your DMs to see when the first messages were exchanged. This will indicate the day you guys followed each other.
Check Their Comment On Your Post
Another way to gauge when someone followed you on Instagram is to look at their comments on your post. You can do this by looking through your earlier posts back to when you think they followed you, and from their checking the comments. The earlier posts you find their comment on would be the closest date to when they followed you.
Sort Your Followers list
When you sort your followers or following list from oldest to newest followers/following, you can check where their accounts fit into this list. You may have followed a certain group of people at a specific time and you might see their account next to them which will indicate a rough time that they followed you at.
Ask Them
If you want to find out when you first started following someone, you can simply ask them. Asking them is a lot less time consuming than using other methods like checking when they first start commenting on your posts but it means that it’s a lot less accurate. You can simply send them a message via DM saying, when did I start following you, can you remember? They may think back to the period that they remember connecting with you on Instagram and it’s possible they’ll remember when you started following them.
Look At When You Added Them On Facebook And Snapchat etc
If you can remember connecting with them on other social media platforms such as Facebook and Snapchat, you can look at the date you became friends with them on Facebook as well as the date you became friends with them on Snapchat. If you know for sure that you added them on socials around the same time, that’ll give you an indicator for when you started following them on Instagram. If you compare two platforms like facebook and snapchat and you can see that you didn’t become friends with them around the same time on those platforms, then there’s no way to be confident that you followed them on Instagram around the same time.
Try And Remember When You First Met
If you can think back to when you first met them, this will help you get an idea of when you followed them. If you remember the things you were doing when you first met, you can remember the dates for those events, or you can look in your camera roll to check when those events were. The pictures that you took around the time you met them will have time stamps and from here you’ll be able to check when it happened. From here you can think back to if you followed them before or after the even and this will let you know when you followed them.
How to See When Someone Followed You on Instagram
If you want to check when someone followed you on Instagram, there are a few ways that you can do so. Some methods are more specific than others to when it comes to giving you the exact date but most of these methods will give you a rough number on when you first started following on Instagram.
Check Your Notifications
You can check your notifications to see when someone followed you on Instagram. If the follow was recent, then it’ll be displayed in your notifications. If it wasn’t so recent, then you won’t be able to check your notifications to see when someone followed you. Make sure to scroll all the way down if you properly want to check when they followed you. If the follow isn’t there, check when their first like was on your post if it’s still in your notifications as this will let you know when they followed you; people typically follow then like your pictures.
Check Your First Messages
If you guys have been friends recently, chances are you’ve messaged each other. You can scroll up to the top of your DMs to see when the first messages were exchanged. This will indicate the day they followed you.
Check Your First Messages With Their Friends That You Followed Around The Same Time
If you became friends with their friendship group as well as them, and you remember they all followed you at the same time, then you can scroll up to your first direct messages with their friends to have an idea of when they followed you. Checking when you were first in contact with their friends will give you a rough timeline of when they followed you. If you haven’t DMd any of them, then you won’t be able to do this.
Check Screenshots
If you were happy that they followed you, or you told your friends about it in the group chat, then you can check the screenshots you would’ve to take to send it to your friends. You can check the timestamp of the screenshot in your camera roll and it’ll let you know when they followed you. If you remember that you didn’t take a screenshot of the notification when they followed you, then you won’t be able to find out when they did it.
How to Know Who Followed First on Instagram
If you’re not sure if you followed someone first or they followed you first when you’re mutually following each other, then there are a few ways that you can find out. If they followed you and you followed them, checking your notifications will be useless because you won’t be able to tell if you’re the one that followed them first and they followed you back or you followed them first and they followed you back.
Check Your Messages
Usually, when someone follows you or you follow them first, one person DMs the other person and it could be related to the follow. Could be something along the lines of ‘stalking me are you’. If you can see this is one of the first messages sent by them, then you followed them first. If you sent this message to them, chances are they followed you first.
Ask Them
If you’re unsure who followed who first and you haven’t spoken to them about it, then the first thing you need to ask them is “did you follow me first or did I follow you first.” With this message, if they do remember and you can trust their judgment, then they’ll let you know who followed who first. If they don’t really remember, then don’t try and push them for an answer as it won’t be very accurate.
Check Your Following and Followers List
Another thing that you can do to check your follower’s list and then compare it with your following list in chronological order (your follower’s list is in chronological order by default). If you can see that there are loads of people that followed you (let’s name this group of people x) after this specific person followed you (let’s name them y), and you followed x back, but on your following list in chronological order, y’s name is way above x’s name but you know you followed y as soon as they followed you, then you can conclude that y followed you first and you followed y a period of time after. If the opposite of this scenario happened, you can conclude that you followed y first and they followed you back a period of time after. If you followed them as soon as they followed you, then using this method won’t be very useful but if you took a while back to follow them back, then it’ll pretty much let you know who followed who first on Instagram.
How to See How Long You’ve Been Following Someone on Instagram
To know how long you’ve been following someone on Instagram, you need to check your first message with them. If you scroll all the way to the top of your messages with them, you can find out exactly how long you’ve been following them. If you know that you conversed with them as soon as you followed them, then this will accurately tell you how long you’ve followed them. Another way to find out how long you’ve been following someone is to ask them. To ask them, simply send them a DM saying, “do you know how long we’ve been following each other”.
