Insta stalkers can be an unavoidable nuisance for anyone with a public Instagram account. They can lurk on your page without following you or liking/commenting on any of your posts. But unless they watch your story, you’ll never know they were there.
This can be concerning for a number of reasons. And while the most straightforward solution is just to make your account private, this isn’t always ideal or even possible. Influencers and business owners, for example, might avoid making their accounts private to ensure they get increased engagement and brand awareness. In fact, business accounts on Instagram don’t have the option to make their profile or content private. And for the general public at large, some people just aren’t as concerned about keeping their content private, or they want to boost their followers and popularity by remaining public.
But everyone may occasionally stalk others on Instagram without following them, and it’s rarely done with bad intentions or results in harm against the person you’re stalking. But this might lead you to wonder who exactly is stalking your Instagram account?
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Can I Check My Insta Stalker – A Reality Check
So can you really find out who your Insta stalkers are? Unfortunately, you aren’t able to find out who looks at your content, whether they follow you or not. If you’re curious to find out if your jealous ex has been peeping your new posts, you’re out of luck.
And while this may be disappointing if you’re just dying of curiosity or generally concerned about who might be stalking you, it’s important to remember that this is a function of Instagram’s privacy rules. There used to be a dedicated page on your Instagram that would show everyone what the people that they follow were up to (who they’ve started following, what pics they might have liked, etc.), but even this function has since been removed from the platform. The app even recently got a similar third-party app banned from the Apple store for providing a similar service.
Instagram is quite concerned with the issue of privacy for their users, and this is something that most of us can certainly appreciate. They’ve previously even announced they would make the number of likes that each post received invisible, so only the person who posted it would know who liked their content. After some serious backlash over this idea, the company hasn’t rolled out that update. But it does indicate the direction that the company has taken when it comes to the availability of engagement data. While some of the motivation behind these initiatives is also about reducing the psychological impact and obsession with engagement, it does also play a role in user confidentiality.
But then again, if you’re interacting with people on social media, are you really entitled to doing so in private? According to Instagram’s privacy features, it seems that the company thinks that on some level, yes, you are. There’s still an argument to be made, though, that Insta stalkers (those who don’t follow an account but still view its content with frequency) poses potential risks to the person being stalked. But unfortunately, it’s just not possible to find out the identities of Instagram stalkers.
Can You Track Instagram Stalkers on a Business Account?
If you’re using Instagram for a business account, there are a few added features that are designed to help you understand overall engagement, as this can be an important metric for crafting effective marketing strategies. It does this with a tool called Instagram Insights, which provides analytics about your audience.
Insights will tell you how your profile and your content has performed over the last week. This includes how many people visited your profile and how many people viewed your posts, among other helpful information. And while it does give you a detailed breakdown of your audience demographics (age, gender, location, etc.), it does not give you any specific information or identify people and profiles that are viewing your profile.
So even though it’s incredibly helpful for business owners when it comes to improving their social marketing, it does not allow you to see who your Insta stalker is.
Why do you want to know about your followers & Your Instagram Stalkers?
Knowing who follows you and who is stalking your Instagram is important for a number of reasons. Whether you run a business, operate as an influencer or brand ambassador, or are just a casual user who wants some insight on your popularity among peers and others, understanding exactly who is checking out your Instagram content can be beneficial. There’s safety issues, brand awareness, and general curiosity.
First and foremost, you have to keep safety in mind. It can be easy to forget in the social media age just how significant your shared content is to your overall data privacy. Always be mindful of what you share and think about how it could be used in harmful ways.
Social media influencers, for example, are at risk of being stalked IRL, that is to say, literally stalked outside of the internet by obsessive fans or even vengeful trolls. While most stalking stays within the confines of the cyber domain, there are plenty of unstable individuals out there who will take their obsession to the next level and escalate to the point of being a genuine threat to your safety. Some influencers even consider deleting their accounts altogether! For this reason, you may wonder who is viewing or stalking your Instagram profile.
Another reason you may want to know who is looking at your profile could be to understand and analyze metrics if you’re using the platform to promote a product or service. If that product is you (as in you’re a social media influencer or Instagram model, for instance), it can be helpful to ensure brand efficiency by getting to the bottom of who is viewing your Instagram posts.
Finally, and probably the most relatable reason for the general public, is just for curiosity’s sake. Social media has made us all a little more interested in how we’re viewed by our friends online. And it could also be vindicating to see just who stalks your profile without actually following it. On a personal level, this is a pretty common desire among Instagram users. And let’s be real. Everyone does some Insta stalking. Whether you’re checking out a Tinder date or checking up on your ex to see if they’re doing worse or better without you, it’s a reasonable inclination to stalk someone who you aren’t yet following. Not all Insta stalking is nefarious, after all.
Suggested Read: Private Instagram Viewers to See Stories, Profiles & DP
How to See Who Viewed My Instagram Profile
Instagram doesn’t make this information publicly available. Not to anyone. So don’t fall for any third-party apps or sites that claim they’ll provide this service. Any of the apps out there that are boasting this ability are more than likely scams that intend to access your data with your explicit permission. When you install these apps, they are able to scrape your data and often sell it or use it for more nefarious purposes.
Many of the apps that are advertising the capabilities to allow you to see who stalks you on Instagram are not free. So you’re better off saving your money and protecting your data by avoiding them altogether.
Some more legitimate apps help you track your followers and will tell you if and when someone has unfollowed you. One of the primary benefits of these apps is letting you know who recently unfollowed you as well as who among the people you follow aren’t following you back. They will also aggregate data that shows you which of your followers interact with your content the most and which of your posts perform the best. Some share historical data that rates your best performing posts as well.
There are a lot of these apps out there, and not all of them are created equal. Be sure to read the reviews for these third-party apps first, as some of them are far less reputable and reliable than others. Also, it’s important to remember that these apps often aim to collect your data. So even if they’re free, there’s still potentially a cost when it comes to your overall data privacy.
We’ve reviewed a few of the top apps that provide follower insights and here’s what we found:
1. Follower Analyzer for Instagram
Follower Analyzer is available on the Play Store. It will allow you to track the activities of your followers as they pertain to you, so it won’t show you all of the actions they are taking in relation to other accounts on the platform. For example, it won’t show you what content your followers are engaging with on other Instagram profiles.
Users also report that the app is not reliable, often very buggy, and generally quite problematic, so that’s something to keep in mind.
2. Followers Insight for Instagram
This functions a lot like Instagram Insights for business accounts, using engagement data and growth patterns to help you optimize your posts. It also lets you monitor multple Instagram accounts that you own and easily switch between them.
Though not the best functionality or most reliable app, the insights can be valluable to monitoring and optimizing your content.
3. Followers Insight for Instagram, tracker, analyzer
This app can help you see who among your followers is engaging with your content the most. It also provides insights about your “secret admirers” though it’s unclear how it aggregates that data and what it’s based on.
We can’t comment on how reliable some of the information is because it’s really hard to understand how the app concludes who your secret admirers are. All in all, it’s best used to track followers and unfollows.
4. Follower Analyzer For Instagram – Follower Tracker
This offers the same basic insights as the others, but includes a paid subscription model that claims to unlock added features, like who your stalkers are (those who don’t follow but view your posts) or who blocked you.
However, it’s not a reputable app and the users who’ve upgraded to the paid subscription report that the functions it’s supposed to unlock do not work. So just save your money and don’t upgrade to the paid pro service.
5. Insights for Instagram
In addition to tracking your mutual followers and people who have unfollowed you, this app provides insights into your “ghost followers,” but don’t be fooled by the phrasing. Ghost followers do not refer to the people who are stalking you but not following you. Rather, ghost followers are those of your followers who aren’t interacting with your posts.
This might be the best option when it comes to tracking your followers and engagement. It’s the least buggy platform of the bunch and has the most positive user reviews overall.
Solution: How to Check Who Stalks My Instagram?
Though there are some apps that will provide data similar to the Instagram Insights tool that business accounts can use, like those listed above, they won’t identify specific Insta stalkers that aren’t following you but are frequently viewing your content. They can provide information about how many people are viewing your profile or specific posts, if you’ve lost or gained followers, and who follows you but doesn’t follow you back or vice versa.
And any that claim to do so are more than likely fake.
Sometimes, those apps offer a paid pro version that says it can drill down into the data and provide specifics, but they’re not legitimate. They won’t be able to reveal the identity of an Instagram stalker or provide any insight into who specifically among your followers is viewing your content, primarily because the Instagram API doesn’t allow developers to access or disseminate that information.
Can You See Who Views Your Instagram?
Are you obsessively wondering Who viewed my Instagram? You might want to know who’s popping in to check out your content without ever following you. But since this isn’t a possibility, there are some other solutions to see who might be viewing your Instagram.
When it comes to your Instagram stories, the platform does show you exactly who watched your story, even if they don’t follow you. All you have to do to see this is click on your own story and in the bottom left, you’ll see a number and some small thumbnails of profile pics overlapping. These are the profiles of some of the people who’ve viewed your story. If you click on those, it’ll expand to show the full list of Instagram users who watched your story.
Of course, this only provides a limited scope as an Insta stalker would have to view your stories to be revealed. But it will illuminate a pattern of stalking if you see the same person that isn’t following you regularly viewing your stories. That’s a pretty good indicator that they’re checking in on your account with some frequency. That being said, there are apps and websites that let people view Instagram stories on public accounts anonymously, so stealthy Insta stalkers might be flying completely under the radar.
Aside from stories, though, Instagram won’t share with you the identities of anyone who is viewing your profile or your posts. If you want to prevent Instagram stalkers from seeing your content without following you, you can set your account to private.
For people who aren’t able to do so or just don’t want to, you’re only recourse if you fear you have an Instagram stalker is to block the person you suspect, and/or report them if they’re harassing you. If you’ve got an Instagram stalker that isn’t causing you any harm or being a bother, then aside from making your account private there’s nothing you can do about it.
Conclusion
Safety and privacy issues aside, unless you have real reasons to suspect that someone is stalking you it’s probably not anything you need to be concerned about. People stalk Instagram accounts out of mild to moderate curiosity, and rarely with intentions of doing harm. Voyeurism is an inevitable side effect of the social media age we live in, and unless you want to make your account private, it’s something you’ll just have to make peace with.