FollowBell
On your own profile, yes. On anybody else's, no. Instagram will sort your own following list by date followed if you ask it to. On someone else's profile that option does not exist, and the order you are shown is reordered before it reaches you.
We measured how far off it is. The ten accounts the Instagram app displayed first, on a public account with around five hundred follows, sat at positions 23, 42, 18, 12, 16, 35, 43, 10, 38 and 34 of that account's real following list.
What Instagram does give you, on your own profile
Open your profile, tap Following, and there is a sort control at the top of the list. Date followed: Latest puts the account you followed most recently first, and Earliest flips it. It is exact, it is chronological, and it works.
It is also the only place that sort exists. Open somebody else's profile and look for the same control: there is no sort at all, only a list.
What that list on someone else's profile really is
It looks ordered, which is the problem. People assume the accounts at the top are the newest follows, and act on it. So we checked, on a public account picked because it had no follows in common with ours, which rules out any personal affinity in the ranking.
We wrote down everyone that account follows, in the order Instagram itself hands the list over, then opened the same profile in the Instagram app and noted where each of the first ten accounts it showed actually sat in that list.
| Shown by the app at | Real position in the list |
|---|---|
| 1 | 23 |
| 2 | 42 |
| 3 | 18 |
| 4 | 12 |
| 5 | 16 |
| 6 | 35 |
| 7 | 43 |
| 8 | 10 |
| 9 | 38 |
| 10 | 34 |
All ten accounts were in the list, so nothing was invented or hidden. But not one of them was near the top, and the relative order was not preserved either: the app's number 8 sits ahead of its number 1.
The short version. The top of somebody's following list is not the people they followed last. It is a ranking, and the ranking is not published.
Does the order mean anything at all?
Instagram has never documented it, so anyone telling you what it means is guessing, us included. What can be demonstrated is what it is not. It is not chronological, it is not stable enough to compare two visits by eye, and it changes depending on who is looking.
If you want one thing to remember: an order you cannot explain is an order you cannot use.
So how do you find out what someone recently followed?
By comparing rather than reading. If you know every account somebody followed yesterday, then whatever is in today's list and was not in yesterday's was followed in between. No date is needed, because the comparison itself is the date.
That is the whole idea behind a follow tracker, and it is also its honest limit: it can only tell you about changes that happened after it started looking. Anything before that is gone. How to see who someone recently followed on Instagram goes through what is and is not possible.
Doing it by hand
It is possible, and on a small account it is reasonable. Write down everyone an account follows, come back tomorrow, compare the two lists. On an account with five hundred follows, that is five hundred names to record and five hundred to check, every single day, against a list that arrives in an order that changes.
That is the gap these apps exist to fill. Not access to anything secret, just the patience to compare two long lists every few hours.
FollowBell does the comparing
It watches a public Instagram account and tells you when its following list changes. No login, no password, nothing to connect.
