Maintaining your Instagram presence these days can be hard work. Besides determining the most relevant content for your audience, you probably spend time — more than you might like to admit — watching your followers count go up or down. When the total number of followers gets smaller, it’s frustrating to wonder “Who unfollowed me on Instagram?”
Fortunately, options will allow you to monitor decreased followers without wanting to pull your hair out from the mystery of not knowing.
1. The Manual Method
If you are a new user of Instagram or otherwise don’t have many followers, you can take a manual approach to answering the “Who unfollowed me on Instagram?” question:
- Go to your Instagram profile
- Access the profiles of all the people you’re following
- See if they’re following you back
- When you find an instance where they aren’t, that information could tell you which person stopped following you
This option is extremely time-consuming unless you only have a small number of followers or a lot of free time. So, it’s not ideal in most cases.
2. Work With Raw Data in Excel
If you have access to Excel, a three-step process allows you to do the same steps mentioned above, but much faster through the power of the “Find Duplicates” option.
It requires you to login to your Instagram account through a computer browser instead of on your phone and use some of Excel’s features to determine which followers you have that don’t follow you back.
People who try it say it’s a relatively fast process once you get the hang of it, and that it’s much preferable to solely doing the process by hand.
Caveats About the Available Apps
Considering there’s an app for almost anything imaginable, you’re probably not surprised to know there are apps that claim to give information about lost followers. But, you shouldn’t think of them as the magic tools that will definitely offer the information you seek.
Apps do exist to get to the bottom of your “Who unfollowed me on Instagram?” query, but there are things to keep in mind about them.
Instagram regularly changes its application programming interface (API), and an update made in early December 2018 made several of the Instagram unfollower apps stop working.
Moreover, reviewers occasionally warn that they have difficulties using even the well-reviewed apps and complain that they don’t always give the detailed information they want. For example, some apps provide number-based statistics about the people who don’t follow you but don’t reveal the usernames of those people.
There are also possible security concerns with using these third-party apps since they require people to provide their Instagram account details by logging into Instagram through them. If you’re worried about apps possibly tracking personal data, bear this in mind.
When trying any app, keep these things in mind and don’t get your hopes up too high for success. With those precautions out of the way, let’s take a look at three of the apps you could try.
1. Unfollowers for Instagram – Non-Followers 2019
This app for Android is free, and some reviewers report it still works for them after the latest API update. Also, the app gives you the usernames of people who unfollowed you instead of showing a numerical total.
2. Followers Track for Instagram
This is an iOS app that has complimentary basic functionality and requires you to pay for some premium features through in-app purchases. Besides allowing you to see who unfollowed you, it gives other metrics, like the people who post comments to you most often.
If you’re trying to increase your Instagram presence in 2019 and want to focus more on metrics, this app could be a good start for helping you understand which Instagram videos your followers want to download most depending on the activity levels associated with your account, for example.
3. Twitly
This app works for either iOS or Android, and it has features for Twitter, too. Besides seeing who unfollowed you on Instagram, the app claims you can watch Instagram stories anonymously. It’s also possible to set notifications in the app, so you know right away if someone stops following. That feature could be helpful if you’re wondering about the effects of a controversial post.
Many Instagram unfollower apps have extremely mixed reviews or not enough reviews to allow you to make an informed decision about downloading them. However, this one seems more popular than most, and it has a high percentage of satisfied users.
Use the Apps With Caution
People who use Instagram frequently warn that even if a particular app works at a given time, another API change could render it useless.
Some of them even think there will soon be a day where it’s not possible to answer “Who unfollowed me on Instagram?” no matter how much money you pay or how much time you spend searching for a solution.
So, while there’s no harm in trying the apps listed here and seeing if they work for you, it’s also a good idea to get familiar with the Excel method that doesn’t rely on a third-party app.
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