How To View your Follow Requests on Instagram

Gregory Read more August 10, 2021

Instagram allows you to garner a following of like-minded individuals who appreciate (or despise) your posts. Looking forward to sharing your story with the world? The default settings for Instagram are set to public which means that anyone and everyone is allowed to see what you’ve posted.

Not quite ready to put yourself out there? No worries. You can change your account from public to private and prevent unwanted eyes from ogling your photos at any time. The caveat is that when you set your account to private, any individuals wanting to follow you will have to make a request first.

If you’ve decided on keeping your Instagram account set to private, you’ll need to know exactly where to look for any incoming follow requests. If interested in learning how, continue to follow along and you’ll be an expert in no time.

Setting Your Profile To Private

Setting your profile to private is an important feature to know how to use on Instagram for your safety and privacy. Luckily, it is as easy as following these steps:

Launch the Instagram app and navigate to your profile in the bottom right.
Open the menu by tapping the hamburger icon (three bars) at the top right.
Tap “Settings.”
Select “Privacy.”
Toggle the slider that says “Private Account” to on.

Approving or Denying Instagram Follow Requests

To approve or deny a potential follower:

Launch the Instagram app and navigate to your Activity feed which appears as a heart-shaped icon.
Tap on the username of the individual requesting to follow you.
At the top of the screen, it should show their profile picture and name, along with a confirm and delete button. Select “Confirm.”

If you rejected a request by accident, it cannot be undone. The requester will need to re-request a follow in order for you to accept it. An accept or reject processes instantly, so be sure you choose correctly the first time in order to avoid this in the future.

Mass Approving

Swapping your Instagram account from public to private means that you must approve or deny each follow request individually. However, there is an easy workaround to minimize the time required to accept large amounts of followers. To accept all requests you can swap your private profile to public. You can then reset your account back to private if you so wish. Be mindful; it is definitely best to look through the list of follow requests before using this trick

Checking the Status of your Own Follow Request

If you’ve sent someone a request, you can easily figure out if it’s been accepted or denied. If it’s been accepted, you should now be able to see their posts on your primary feed. You’ll also receive a notification in your Activities feed (the heart icon).

A denied request takes a little more detective work but not much. All you need to do is navigate over to the user’s profile page. From here, the follow button will read as one of three things that provide the status of your request:

Following – This means the request has been accepted. Congrats!
Pending – This indicates that they haven’t gotten around to making a decision yet. Be patient.
Follow – The standard “Follow” is back which means you’ve been denied. Tough break. You can always make another attempt, just don’t go overboard.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully this article has made the process of making your profile private and accepting follower requests a little more clear. If you have any experience, tips or questions regarding follower requests, leave a comment in the section below!