Instagram is one of the largest and most popular social networks. While this handy app allows us to share photos with vintage filters easily, it’s not always easy to connect with people we know on this app, especially when many people don’t use their real names.

This article explains how to find people you know on Instagram without asking them.

1. Sync Your Contacts with Instagram

If you have the person’s information saved on your phone, it’s possible to find their Instagram profile by syncing your contact with Instagram. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open Instagram and tap Settings.
2. Tap Account, then tap Contacts Syncing.
3. Tap Connect Contacts to turn on contact syncing.

This allows Instagram to recommend accounts to follow based on your contacts. If you don’t have the person’s contact information on your phone, or if the person doesn’t allow their account to be found this way, try the next method.

2. Search Username

If sync contacts don’t bring up the profile you are looking for, it’s possible that the person’s Instagram page is not linked to that particular phone number or email address.

In this case, you can try Instagram search options. But this requires you to know the person’s Instagram username. If you don’t know it, try searching for the person’s full name, nickname, or username on other social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat.

1. Open Instagram.
2. Tap Magnifying Glass Icon.
3. Tap Search in the search bar at the top.
4. Type the person’s possible username.

Instagram will show you possible matching accounts as you start typing the username. You’ll need to look through the list to see if the account you’re looking for is in it.

3. Check Their Associates

People usually connect with their friends and families on social media platforms. So if you’ve connected with the person’s friends, coworkers, or family members on Instagram, try browsing their Follower/Following list to see if you can locate the person there.

Alternatively, if you know the company the person works for, the university they attended, or an organization they belong to, try searching for the associated Instagram accounts and see if they are on the Follower list.

4. Use a People Finder Tool

If the methods above don’t give you any luck, you might want to try a third-party people finder tools like TruthFinder or Social Catfish.

A people finder tool is a professional search tool that provides detailed information about people, such as names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, social media/dating accounts, criminal reports, and more. It works like a search engine only with people-related information. You can use it to find information about someone using some other information you know about them.

While there are many people finders on the market, not every one of them can help you with finding someone’s social media accounts. Our favorite tools are TruthFinder and Social Catfish. All you need to do is type the person’s name into the tool and it will scour social platforms, government watch lists, court records, traffic offenses, and criminal records to create a report about the person you’re looking for.

TruthFinder’s report looks like the screenshot below. You can check the Social section to view social media accounts linked to the person after your search.

5. Dig Up Information with Search Engines

The last method is a basic web search. You can type “Instagram + the person’s full name” into a search engine like Google and see if it can pick up information associated with the person.

For example, type Instagram + john doe.

It’s unlikely that Google will display the person’s Instagram page on your first search, but it might bring up web pages or posts where the person’s information was mentioned. Just look through the results to see if you can find any clues that can lead you to the person’s Instagram page.