Last updated: September 2026
Key Takeaways
- Most Instagram tricks lists are museums. IGTV, Guides, swipe-up links, the Shop tab and 30 hashtags are all gone, so check the date on any guide before you follow it.
- Reset suggested content is the single most underused setting in the app. It clears your recommendations across Explore, Reels and Feed, and you can’t undo it.
- The Favorites feed gives you a chronological view of up to 50 accounts you pick. The catch is you can’t set it as your default, so you re-select it every session.
- Restrict is the control almost nobody knows about. It silences someone without telling them, which is what most people actually want instead of blocking.
- Trial Reels show a reel only to people who don’t follow you. It’s the one genuinely clean way to test an idea without spending your followers’ patience on it.
- You cannot hide your followers list, and Instagram has never had a “who unfollowed me” feature. Every app promising one wants your login.
Here’s the problem with Instagram tricks lists.
Almost all of them still tell you to open the hamburger menu, download the Boomerang app, or stuff 30 hashtags in a comment. Those instructions describe an app that stopped existing years ago.
Meanwhile Instagram quietly shipped a genuinely useful set of controls that almost nobody uses. You can wipe your own recommendation history. You can silence someone without them ever finding out. You can test a reel on strangers before your followers see it.
So this is that list: 14 things that work in the app as it exists today, plus an honest section at the end on what’s dead so you stop looking for it.
What Counts as an Instagram Trick Worth Knowing?
A useful Instagram trick is a setting that changes an outcome you care about: what shows up in your feed, who can reach you, or whether your content gets distributed. Anything that just rearranges an icon is a tip, not a trick.
That filter kills about 80 percent of what gets published on this topic, including most of what used to be on this page.
It also splits the good ones into three groups, which is how the rest of this guide is organised: controls over what you see, controls over who sees you, and levers that affect how far your posts travel.
Which Settings Change What You Actually See?
1. Wipe your recommendations and start over
If your Explore tab has drifted somewhere grim, you don’t have to live with it. Profile, then the menu, then Content preferences, then Reset suggested content.
It clears recommended content across Explore, Reels and Feed in one go, and offers to walk you through your follow list and ad topics while you’re in there. Take that second offer. Your follows are feeding the recommendations, so a reset alone drifts back within a month.
Two costs: it can’t be undone, and your feed gets noticeably duller for a week or two while the system relearns you.
2. Build a Favorites feed of 50 accounts
Tap “Instagram” at the top left of your home screen and you get three options: Home, Following and Favorites.
Favorites is a chronological feed of up to 50 accounts you choose. No recommendations, no suggested posts, just those people in the order they posted.
The cost is deliberate on Instagram’s part: neither Favorites nor Following can be set as your default. You tap into it every single session, and if you close the app you’re back in the algorithmic feed. Instagram’s stated reasoning is that people report being more satisfied with a ranked feed.
3. Use Following when you’re trying to catch up, not browse
Following is the pure reverse-chronological feed of everyone you follow. It’s the closest thing left to Instagram circa 2015.
Worth knowing what it’s good for. If you follow 2,000 accounts it’s unusable noise. If you follow 200 it’s the fastest way to see what you actually missed, because nothing is being reordered or held back.
4. Mute instead of unfollowing
Muting hides someone’s posts or stories from your feed while you stay following them. They’re never told.
Press and hold their story in the tray, or open their profile and use the Following button. You can mute posts, stories, or both independently, which is the part people miss. Plenty of accounts are worth following for their posts and exhausting in their stories.
5. Set up Hidden Words before you need it
Hidden Words filters comments and message requests containing words, phrases, numbers or emoji you nominate, and drops them into a hidden folder you can review later.
Instagram ships a predefined offensive-terms list you can switch on, plus a custom list. For a business account, the custom list is where the real value sits: add your competitors’ spam phrases, the crypto-bot vocabulary, and the two or three words your particular audience fights about.
One limitation to plan around: the DM-request filtering isn’t supported on the web, so if you moderate from a desktop you’ll still see them there.
How Do You Control Who Sees Your Stuff?
Four tools do very different jobs here, and most people only know two of them.
6. Restrict the person you don’t want to block
Restrict is the most useful control in Instagram and the least known.
Restricting someone means their comments stop notifying you, they can’t see when you’re online, and they can’t tag, mention or remix you. They are not told, and from their side very little looks different.
That’s the whole point. Blocking a colleague, a relative or a customer creates a conversation. Restricting them doesn’t.
7. Post to Close Friends only
Close Friends started as a Stories feature and now covers feed posts too. You keep one list, and anything you mark goes to that list alone.
Nobody outside the list can tell a Close Friends post exists. People on it see a green ring.
For a business account this is more useful than it first appears. It’s a clean way to soft-launch to a small group of regulars, or to run something for a handful of collaborators without publishing it to everyone.
8. Archive instead of deleting
Archiving pulls a post off your profile without destroying it. Your engagement history, comments and saves all survive, and you can restore it later.
Default to this over deleting. A deleted post is gone along with everything it taught you, and as we cover in our piece on how the Instagram algorithm works, deleting a post that merely underperformed buys you nothing anyway.
9. Approve tags manually
By default anyone can tag you and it lands on your profile’s tagged tab. You can change that to manual approval in your privacy settings, under Tags and mentions.
Worth doing on any account with a real audience, because the tagged tab is a surface you don’t control and spam accounts know it.
10. Turn Saved Collections into a research library
Saving a post is obvious. Organising saves into named Collections is the part almost nobody does, and it’s private.
Build one per content format you’re studying: hooks, carousel structures, caption openings. Then when you’re stuck you’re reading a curated file instead of scrolling hoping for inspiration. It pairs well with our guide to writing better Instagram captions.
Which Tricks Actually Help Your Content Travel?
11. Test on strangers with Trial Reels
This is the best genuinely new tool Instagram has shipped for creators in years.
A Trial Reel goes to non-followers only. Your followers never see it, in Feed or the Reels tab. You get views, likes, comments and shares after roughly 24 hours, compared against your previous trials, and if it performs in the first 72 hours Instagram can push it to your followers automatically.
Toggle Trial on before you share. You need a professional account, which you can switch to in settings, and our walkthrough on setting up an Instagram business account covers what else changes when you do.
The cost is patience. A trial spends a day of your posting slot before you learn anything, so you can’t run one on something time-sensitive.
12. Schedule inside the app, 75 days out
Instagram has native scheduling and a surprising number of people still pay for a third-party tool to do only this.
It’s in Advanced settings in the composer, it covers photos, carousels and reels, and it goes up to 75 days ahead.
What you give up versus a proper tool is the calendar view, team approvals and cross-platform publishing. If you run one account on your own, you don’t need any of that. Our roundup of Instagram apps for marketers covers when paying is worth it.
13. Stop at five hashtags
Not a trick so much as a correction. Since December 2025 Instagram caps posts and reels at five hashtags, and anything past the fifth is ignored.
Adam Mosseri’s framing was that a few specific tags outperform a long list of generic ones, and that tags help with search rather than reach. So treat your five as search terms someone would genuinely type, not as a net.
14. Rearrange your grid
Instagram switched profile thumbnails to a taller, vertical-aligned crop in January 2025, which broke a lot of carefully built grids. In June 2025 it finally allowed rearranging.
Two things follow. Design for the taller crop, not a square, or your text gets clipped. And you can now move your three best posts to the top, which matters because that’s most of what a first-time visitor judges you on.
Which Instagram Tricks Are Dead?
If a guide tells you to do any of these, stop reading it.
- The hamburger menu. Long gone. Settings live under Settings and activity.
- The standalone Boomerang and Hyperlapse apps. Both pulled from the app stores in March 2022. The Boomerang and Superzoom effects themselves still live in the Stories camera, so you need the effect, not the download.
- IGTV. Folded into Instagram video in 2021, app killed in 2022. We wrote up what happened to IGTV and where its features went.
- Swipe-up links. Replaced by link stickers for all accounts back in 2021.
- Thirty hashtags in the first comment. Capped at five, and the comment-versus-caption distinction never mattered.
- Instagram Guides. Retired at the end of 2023.
- The Shop tab and in-app checkout. Shop left the navigation in 2023, and native checkout was deprecated through 2025. Product tags now send people to your site.
- Reposting your own post to Stories for extra reach. Mosseri addressed this directly in April 2026: it doesn’t meaningfully change your reach.
For what’s genuinely current instead, our rundown of Instagram features worth trying and the list of features built for small businesses are both kept up to date.
FAQs
How can you see who unfollowed you on Instagram?
Instagram has never built a way to see who unfollowed you, and every app that offers it needs your login credentials to work.
What’s really being asked here is usually one of two things: did a specific person unfollow me, or why is my follower count going backwards. Those need different answers.
For a specific person, just search their profile. If the button says Follow rather than Following, you have your answer in five seconds with no app involved.
For the count, your Instagram insights already break follows and unfollows out by period, which is the number that actually matters. A daily list of names tells you nothing you can act on.
The failure mode with tracker apps is worth stating plainly. They work by signing in as you, which hands your session to a third party, and Instagram restricts accounts for that kind of automated access. People trade a real account for a vanity metric and are genuinely surprised when it goes wrong.
Decision rule: if you need a name, check the profile. If you need a trend, read your insights. Never install a tracker that asks you to log in, whatever it promises.
Can you hide your followers list on Instagram?
No. There’s no setting that hides your followers or following list, and switching to a private account only gates it to people you’ve already approved.
The underlying worry is usually specific: someone doesn’t want a particular person, an employer, or an ex going through who they follow. Knowing the limits matters more than the feature request.
Here’s exactly what you can do. Going private means non-followers must request access before they see your posts, followers or following. Existing followers keep full visibility, which is the part people forget, so going private after the fact does nothing about anyone already inside.
Removing a follower works and doesn’t notify them, though on a public account they can simply follow again. Blocking is the only genuinely durable version, and it’s visible in its effects.
For a business account there’s a real cost to going private: you lose discovery entirely, since private accounts can’t be recommended to new people. You’d be trading your growth channel for a privacy setting that doesn’t even hide the list from current followers.
Decision rule: if the problem is one person, remove or block them. Only go private if the account is personal and you’ve accepted that discovery stops.
Do those Instagram font generators hurt your profile?
They don’t affect your reach, but they do make your bio unreadable to anyone using a screen reader, and they can break your profile’s searchability.
The mechanism is the thing to understand, because it isn’t obvious. Those generators don’t apply a font. They swap your letters for entirely different Unicode characters that happen to look like stylised letters.
So a screen reader doesn’t get the word “bakery”. It gets a string of mathematical alphanumeric symbols. The RNIB’s guide to accessible social media is blunt about what follows: screen readers often announce the formatting before or between every letter, which makes the text almost impossible to follow, and some skip the words altogether.
The same swap can affect matching in search, since the characters in your styled bio aren’t the letters someone types.
The failure mode is predictable and almost always unintentional. Someone styles their entire bio including their business name and location, then wonders why their profile feels invisible and hears nothing from the audience it locked out.
Decision rule: keep your name, what you do and your location in plain characters. If you want a styled flourish, spend it on one decorative word that carries no information.
How do you make your Instagram profile look professional without a designer?
Fix three things in this order: the top row of your grid, the plain-text clarity of your bio, and your highlight covers. Everything else is decoration.
What people are really asking is why their profile doesn’t convert visitors into followers. That decision happens in a couple of seconds, on a screen showing roughly your bio and six thumbnails.
So start with the grid. Thumbnails have been a taller vertical crop since January 2025, and since June 2025 you can rearrange them. Move your three strongest posts to the top and design new ones for the tall crop so nothing important sits where it clips.
Then the bio. One line on what you do, one on who it’s for, one call to action. No styled fonts on any of it, for the reasons above.
The failure mode is spending a weekend on a colour-matched aesthetic grid while the bio still says something vague. A beautiful grid that doesn’t explain what you sell converts worse than a plain one that does, and the aesthetic approach carries an ongoing tax: every future post has to match or it wrecks the effect.
Decision rule: if a visitor can’t tell what you do and who it’s for in three seconds, fix the words before you touch the visuals.
Does Instagram tell someone when you screenshot their story?
No. Instagram does not notify anyone when you screenshot a story, a post, a reel or a profile. The only place a screenshot alert fires is a disappearing photo or video sent in a direct message.
This myth is unusually persistent because it was briefly true. Instagram tested screenshot notifications for stories in early 2018 and pulled the test within months. It has never come back, but the rumour long outlived it.
Be precise about the exception, since it’s the part that actually matters. In DMs, content sent using the disappearing or view-once mode does trigger an alert to the sender. Regular messages and regular photos in a chat do not.
There is a real trace that people confuse for a notification: story viewer lists. Anyone can see that you watched, for 48 hours after posting. You weren’t caught screenshotting, you were caught looking, which is a different thing.
Decision rule: assume screenshots are private and views are not. If you don’t want your name in someone’s viewer list, don’t open the story.
What’s the difference between muting, restricting and blocking someone?
Muting controls what you see, restricting controls what they can do to you without telling them, and blocking removes them from your Instagram entirely.
The real question is almost always social rather than technical: how do I make this stop without starting a fight. That’s exactly what Restrict was built for, and it’s why so many people reach for blocking and regret it.
Specifically: muting hides their posts, their stories, or both, while you stay following and they retain every ability they had. Restricting stops their comments notifying you, hides your online status from them, and prevents them tagging, mentioning or remixing you, with no notification sent. Blocking ends their access to your profile, content and messages.
Each has a cost. Muting leaves the behaviour intact, so a person spamming your comments keeps doing it. Restricting is quiet but partial, and they can still see everything you post. Blocking is thorough and unmistakable, and on a business account it can turn a private annoyance into a public complaint.
Decision rule: mute for volume, restrict for behaviour you want to end quietly, block only when you’ve accepted they will notice.
Can you schedule Instagram posts inside the app?
Yes. Instagram has native scheduling for photos, carousels and reels, up to 75 days ahead, in Advanced settings in the composer.
Two anxieties sit underneath this question. One is whether it exists at all, because the setting is buried. The other is whether scheduling quietly costs you reach, which it doesn’t: this is Instagram’s own tool, and the platform also lets you schedule Trial Reels.
What native scheduling genuinely lacks is a calendar view, approval workflow, cross-platform publishing and the ability to schedule Stories. If you’re one person running one account, none of those are worth paying for. If you’re a team of three across four platforms, all of them are.
The cost isn’t algorithmic, it’s editorial. Content built a fortnight out can’t react to anything, and reactive content is what people forward. Accounts that schedule everything drift into a tone that’s competent and completely flat.
Decision rule: schedule your baseline so you never go dark, and keep one slot a week empty for something you make that day.
Conclusion
Notice what the useful tricks have in common. None of them are hacks.
They’re settings Instagram built on purpose and then buried four taps deep: control over your own recommendations, a way to silence someone without a confrontation, a sandbox for testing ideas on strangers. The era of gaming the app is over, and Mosseri has been fairly blunt that when they find a hack, they close it.
What’s left is knowing your tools. Which, honestly, was always the better bet.
Read next: fun things worth trying on Instagram, our guide to Instagram Stories, and how to read your Instagram analytics so you can tell whether any of this worked.
If you’d rather someone else kept track of which features are alive this quarter, talk to AB Media. That’s the job.
