Stalker-alert! Nah, not really. There’s nothing wrong with being a bit curious about what your friends have been looking at, and Instagram isn’t any different from other kinds of social media. Well, it is – for starters, your feed is filled with photos, hashtags, and not much else. It’s a bit less intuitive if you want to check it out, but we’ve got you covered.

Likes, comments, and other forms of engagement are the biggest metrics used to measure Instagram activity for prospective influencers. The established personalities are likely to have found their own niches and categories, but the rest of us aren’t always that lucky in that regard. The activity of your friends and circles really help give ideas on the best directions to take your accounts for development.

Also, knowing when your follower base is up is very important for bloggers, advertisers, influencers, and businesses to figure out their respective community’s peak hours for maximum coverage.

It’s pretty simple, honestly. At least for checking in on the pictures and videos people like.

Step 1: Tap on the Heart icon on your Instagram on mobile.

Step 2: Check your activity.

You’ll be able to see the everything they like: This includes posts (videos + photos) and comments. This is decent enough for most people checking out their friends’ activity logs.

Why should you care about other people’s Instagram activity?

If you plan on profiting off Instagram – and even if you don’t – this lets you know what’s in and trendy. Instagram users make accounts for either advertising, popularity, or documentation purposes. The former two overlap the most, and always fill in the later need as well. The information available gives you a rough grasp on what people are interested in. Even if it’s just seen on the Instagram notifications above, it’s still free insight into what kinds of things hold some people’s attention.

Instagram Analytics was made for this purpose, providing insight on follower statistics like age, peak hours of activity, geolocation, and the like to give users with business accounts (IA only available for business accounts currently) the means to track their peak demographic audiences.

If you want to give your account a good nudge in the right direction, feel free to make use of social media service buying. It’s actually pretty commonplace for budding influencers, even if it doesn’t sound right initially. The market is jam-packed full of people, and you’ll need every edge you can get. A good service for that is Instagram comments from BuySocialMediaMarketing if you want actual engagement for your account – most similar services tend to only boost your follower count, which is pretty useless on its own. Comments are a great indicator of growth, and you could really expedite the normally tedious process that most users take great pains to deal with.

What problems can you expect with this method?

For businesses and influencers, this is just too tedious to sustain.

First off, these notifications need you to follower users – not very practical, and your own feeds will be swamped by unhelpful content. Also, it might make your account look illegitimate: people could mistake it for a zombie account or an unfollowers profile, which could really drag down your account growth.

Secondly, you can’t pick out specific users from the general feed. You’ll have to sift through all the profiles and activity, and this could easily number in the dozens in most people’s cases. Luckily, we have the technology to bypass this. It comes at a price but is very much worth it if you want to track account activity hassle-free.

You also don’t get to see the posts or comments they like if the accounts they reacted on are private.

Lastly, Instagram likes track only up to eight other posts maximum. Any more than that are completely disregarded from the feed, with you completely unaware of it.

Enter snoopreport

Snoopreport is a third-party Instagram accessory/platform that lets you monitor other user’s activity. It only works on public accounts, but that’s pretty much the only caveat to the application. It provides you with both basic data like likes, comments, and follows done over the duration alongside more complex (and natively unavailable) functions like activity duration estimations, hashtag usage frequency, and chronological order dating. People can also use this to track their favourite celebrities and personalities online to check their own preferences, and that’s perfectly fine.

Step 1: Buy the application.

Step 2: Input usernames. Give the program the time range to work with (up to one whole week)

Step 3: Learn from the information. Sort as needed.

This also has mundane utility in terms of monitoring. This allows parents to track and manage their children’s Instagram activity – be it for making it easier to give them a welcome surprise for the holidays or keep them away from mature content.

Privacy concerns?

It’s important to remember that Snoopreport only works for public profiles – the type of profiles you could actually access their activity on anyhow. Some people would argue that the usage of third-party software is a violation of privacy, but the nature of their accounts already gives away a not-insignificant amount of personal information.

The usage of Snoopreport is mostly for marketing analytics, and they provide information that lets companies make informed decisions for their target consumer bases. If this is a risk you can’t accept, simply set your account to private to put a complete stop to Snoopreport risks.

Wrap up…

If you want to make the most of figuring out what’s the new “In” in Instagram, there’s no problem with working with what you know. It gets pretty hard to carve out your own unique niche in IG while picking a great way to develop, but more information improves your odds and makes it way easier to pull off.

It’s very important to know what people like, but it’s just as important to remember when and where they like them. For all you know, your main follower base could be halfway around the world, and your potential engagement as an influencer will be hampered if you don’t take that into account.

Instagram Analytics is a great way to monitor this kind of information, but it needs you to convert your account to a business profile. This is a huge transition that needs preparations to make work, and you’ll need a lot of information to do it right. Snoopreport lets you do what Instagram Analytics offers and more at a fairly manageable price. Make the most out of it if you choose to use it.

Finally, have fun doing it! Feel free to use the insight your friends’ activity provides, but don’t overthink it. This is social media, and it’s not worth getting worked up over.

Good luck, you budding little influencers!