Has it ever happened to you that someone who was always attentive and engaged to all of your Instagram posts and stories, all of sudden you did not see any of their engagement anymore.
What’s curious is that they are still in your followers list, so why don’t they engage with you?
Well, it has happened to me and until recently, I did not know Instagram had the feature that allows you to mute someone.
Instagram, one of the largest social media platforms worldwide, has had the tool — which believe it or not, not many know it exists — that lets you to mute your followers.
How To Know If Someone Has Muted You On Instagram?
Instagram, respecting the privacy of its user, did not give out any notification and disclose to anyone whenever a user chose to mute another user on their platform.
Hence, there is no specific or correct way for us to know if someone muted us on Instagram, much less knowing the reason why they did it.
In which it is important to figure out what contents have exactly caused such a reaction from your followers, especially if you’re a brand or a rising influencer.
However, thanks to our observation ability as a human being, we are somehow able to tell whether we have been muted by evaluating some basic signs. Let’s check what are the typical signs.
1. They Stopped Engaging With Your Posts
If you have a follower that has never missed out any engagement by commenting or likes your posts and stories, yet suddenly you’re not seeing any interaction from them anymore, high chances that they might have muted you.
It is even more obvious if you notice this particular follower still interacting with your mutual users normally, but there is no sign of interaction with you. With these signs, we can pretty much confirm you have been muted.
2. No Longer Watch Your Stories
You can do similar checking with your Instagram stories to know if someone muted you on Instagram.
If you know a follower that usually will view your stories, yet suddenly the name is not appearing in the viewer list anymore, it is possible that they have muted you, either only your stories, or both stories and posts.
3. Can’t See “Active Now” Status
Whenever you start a chat with someone on Instagram chat, you will be able to see their activity status. Usually, if the person is online, the phrase “Active now” appears along with a small green circle on their profile.
Even if they went inactive, you will still be able to see activity status, either the last active time or just “Active today”, depending on their last active duration.
However, if the activity status simply does not appear, even though both of you have had a two-way communication on Instagram chat, either it is completely blank or empty, most likely you have been muted.
4. Add The Person To Your Best Friends List
This is a quite useful trick when you desperately want to know if someone muted you on Instagram.
To do this, you need to create a separate Close Friends list from the one you usually use. Then, you add that specific person in this list. By adding a single person in the list, you can check if your story has been seen by that person.
Once you have created the list, what you need to do next is create a story and only share it with this newly created Close Friends list. In the period of 24 hours, if the story has not been seen yet, it is likely that they have muted you.
For further confirmation, and also to avoid any misunderstanding, it is recommended to publish more than one story, and carry out this action for several days.
5. Use A 3rd Party App
There are some external apps that allow us to analyze certain Instagram functions.
Known as the Instagram analytic apps, these apps not only allow us to observe who has unfollowed us on Instagram, but also allow us to determine who are ghost followers so that we can remove these ghost followers from our account.
When using the app, you can search whether that suspected person is inside the ghost followers list that is provided by the app. If they do not appear in the list, yet appear as your regular follower, you might have to consider that you have been muted.
It is important to note that most of these 3rd party applications are paid apps. Thus, you need to pay for the service in order to use their functions.
6. Ask If You Have Been Muted
Although we admit it can be quite uncomfortable, and perhaps a little rude, the only definitive way to find out if someone has muted you on Instagram is by asking them directly.
By doing this, you might actually get the reasons why and be able to improve your posted contents.
Be mindful about how you start the conversation, remember to always start the conversation in a respectful and honest manner.
Unfollow VS Mute on Instagram
It is completely normal to not like someone’s content, especially if the content shared is something that you disagree with and you would rather stop seeing it popping on your Instagram feeds.
However, sometime unfollowing them might not be the best option as you might don’t want to hurt their feelings, particularly if the person is your friends or family.
Well, precisely due to this tough situation is why mute is a useful feature. Rather than worry about jeopardizing the relationship, you can just click the three points (in the Following option) on the person’s profile and choose mute.
You even have the option to mute either just the stories or the posts, or maybe both. With this, your mood will improve as well as you won’t see any unpleasant content on your feed anymore.
Besides, since Instagram won’t send any notification when you mute someone, you don’t have to worry about jeopardizing any relationship. However, vice versa, you won’t be able to know as well if someone has muted you.
Muting someone means all the contents, both stories and posts won’t appear on their Instagram feed. This is bad especially if you are an influencer, or a brand that is trying to expand your market. Basically, you are not able to fulfill the most important task of being in social media, that is, being seen.
Therefore, it is recommended to identify these people and take the necessary action on the matter to be visible again so that you are able to optimize the interaction and engagement with the followers.
At the same time, you will also be capable of preventing such incidents from happening again as you are now more aware of the type of content that will cause such reaction from your followers.
Conclusion
Overall, being muted on Instagram has many disadvantages, especially if your career is dependent on the engagement and interaction of followers with you.
Due to the high competition on the platform, getting the ideal social media engagement is extremely hard. Thus, it is infuriating to know that all the efforts on creating content that showcase our identities is not reaching the desired audiences.
Getting muted implies that none of your content, both the stories and posts, is appearing on the person’s Instagram feed. In which your content won’t be able to share out to a bigger audience since there won’t be any engagement happening if they never come across it.
The ideal thing to do is to evaluate our actions and be mindful of the type of content created and published on Instagram.
Avoid making click baiting content that is annoying, over-exaggerating or full of questionable information. More than anything, always try to maintain a positive engagement and build a strong relationship with the audiences.
Last but not least, be yourself and have fun in your own way with your followers.
