Here's Exactly How To Tell If Someone Unfollowed You On Instagram

The rules of social media are so intricate and unspoken and complicated that I imagine those who actually have a strong social media game have a ton of strange factors to think about. Meanwhile, the rest of us just want to know how to tell if someone unfollowed you on Instagram. Seriously. That's all I ever want to know. Who out of my followers decided that my content was no longer worthy of their feed? Who is going on my list? (Don't lie; we all have one.)

Of course, Instagram is a little notorious for making it difficult to tell whether or not someone is still following you — you can't search as easily as you can on other platforms. So for #journalism, I conducted my own experiment to see if I can figure out a way to tell when someone unfollowed me. From my studies I have concluded that there are two ways to do this: Manual and technological. The manual way involves keeping track of people who followed you and checking by hand if a person is still following you after a while. The technological way involves getting a special app that does all of that for you. Obviously one of those is easier, but if you are not comfortable with giving a third party app access to your account, your best bet would be your own thumbs.

I personally do not keep track of my followers in Instagram. I think that my feed is not interesting enough for people to care about, and nothing terrifies me more than a bunch of strangers expecting something cool from me. I do not work well under pressure on social media. But if you are an Insta-savvy individual, then this article is perfect for you.

1. Manual

The first thing you do is locate the person who you want to check in on. I'm going to use my editor @dilemmalord as an example. When she followed me on Instagram I took notice.

If you want to check to see if this person unfollowed you, start by simply going to their profile. Then, click on the "following" button located at the top right of their page. This will take you to a list of all the people that they are following.

As I scrolled down, I noticed that my name did not appear on the list. She had unfollowed me. IT STUNG! Just kidding, we did this was for research. I know she loves my pictures of dogs, cross stitching, and Snapchat outtakes.

2. Technological

This way of finding out who unfollowed you is simpler but requires you to download a third party app. One option is called Followers Track for Instagram! and with over 45,000 ratings in the App store, it seems pretty legit. Once you link your Instagram account to it, the app will track not only who unfollowed you, but also who isn't following you back or who has recently started following you. You can see how many people blocked you, but in order to find out who, you have to pay a subscription fee according to one user's rating. Here's a screenshot of its dashboard from the App store:

Another third party option is FollowMeter for Instagram, which has similar features and ranks your "popularity" on the app. Once you have downloaded the app, you will be asked to sign in into the personal Instagram account that you want to monitor. Complete this step and you are done!

The app also tracks your average likes per post in addition to your "top likers." According to Lifewire, certain features may require a subscription fee, similar to Followers Track For Instagram!. If you're curious about how FollowMeter organizes all of this information, this screenshot from its App store page might give you a better idea:

Good luck to whoever tries to sneakily unfollow you after you download one of these. Finding out who the culprit is can really sting, but hey, at least you uncovered the truth.

Before deciding on these apps or others, it's important to remember that many of them only keep track of things that happen after you sign into your account via the third party app. If you want to know about earlier unfollows, you should employ the first method in this article.

Images: sod tatong/Moment/Getty Images; Instagram