How To Follow Someone On Snapchat

Snapchat is one of the most popular social media apps available on your phone today, especially among younger users. A study from Pew Research examining the social media habits of teenagers in May of 2018 found that Snapchat was one of the most popular apps among that age group, with more than two-thirds of respondents telling Pew they used Snapchat, falling behind only YouTube and Instagram to become the third-most popular app in that age bracket. Even better, teens—who, for clarity, make up some of the most important users for Snapchat's growth and long-term viability—find Snapchat to be the app they use the most often, with 35 percent of teenagers polled using the app the most out of all social media.

For many, this makes Snapchat the most important communication app on their phone. Since every photo or video you send to a group of friends or post to your story disappears after a certain amount of time, it's easy to use Snapchat to broadcast your life to your friends, allowing you to control what they see without having to worry about posting something too embarrassing to last on the internet. The brief nature of things posted on Snapchat is a large part of its appeal, as it makes a little more difficult for your past to come back to haunt you when it disappears after a day.

Considering Snapchat's popularity among its user base, you'll probably want to collect as many followers as you can. As with any other form of social media, your follower count is still important. After all, posting content to Snapchat only matters if you have friends who are looking at your snaps. A lonely Snapchat account means no one will see your stories, and since everything you post fades into the aether just 24 hours after it's been posted, friends you add later on won't be able to see the archive of your photos and videos. If you're looking to find out how many followers you have on Snapchat, and more importantly, whether someone specifically follows you on Snapchat, we have the perfect guide for you. This is our full guide to figuring out if someone follows you on Snapchat.

How to View Your Followers List in Snapchat

Perhaps one of the most difficult things about Snapchat's layout is the inability to easily view a full list of your friends and connections on Snapchat. Unlike other social media options, Snapchat doesn't require both parties to follow each person. You can set your preferences inside the options menu to allow for your stories to be viewable by the public, which allows for anyone who has added you to their account to easily view and add your content to their page. Of course, if you're viewing their Snap stories in your feed, you may not have a way of gauging whether or not the other person has added you back.

The first thing to do when trying to learn if someone has followed you or followed you back on Snapchat is to open the application and slide your finger to the left panel. This tab, known as the Friends tab, is the main place you can communicate with your friends. Since the redesign last year, this tab has been able to be used by Snapchat's users to access all the communication between friends, from viewing private photos and videos to checking out stories. At the top of this panel is a search bar, which allows you to type in the names of people you've personally followed on Snapchat, making it easy to track down some names of the people following you on Snapchat. This list isn't in chronological order; like most social media apps in 2019, Snapchat tries to guess who you'll want to talk to next, based on both your own communication with them, your level of friendship and streaks, and whether or not they've actually posted a story.

While this tab might not explicitly say it, the Friends tab does work as a sort of proto-friends list, an easy enough way to preview whether or not you're being followed on here. On our test account, we checked over fifty followers that appeared in our friends list. Every single one featured in the app was a mutual friend, following us back, which meant we could communicate, send our location, and view their private, friends-only Snap stories without an issue. You can search for specific friends here, too, which is a good way to tell whether someone follows you back. Everyone you follow will appear in the search within Snapchat, but not everyone you follow will appear in the actual friends-only tab. If you aren't a mutual friend with each other, their stories will instead appear on the Discover tab, and though you'll still be able to send them snaps, there's a lower likelihood they open your content.

Still, just using your Friends tab isn't enough to guarantee, within all certainty and without doubt, that someone you follow on Snapchat is following you back. For that, we'll need a new method. After all, you can never be too sure when it comes to your digital life.

How to Tell If Someone Follows You on Snapchat

,You might be surprised to find out it's pretty easy to figure out if someone you follow follows you back on Snapchat. Though not explicitly stated by Snapchat itself, the app actually has a secret way of knowing whether you and the person you follow are mutual friends on the platform, or if you're following their public snaps only. It's unexpected, and honestly, if you aren't familiar with Snapchat on a deep level, you might not even know what to look for. Why Snapchat decided to hide this option is a mystery, though, considering how it is for people to be curious about who is following them.

Let's take a look at understanding a key part of Snapchat: Snap scores.

We've previously looked at Snap scores, what they mean, and how they can help you determine your activity on Snapchat. They've been around since very early in Snapchat's life, always existing as a badge on your profile and appearing whenever anyone adds you on their own account. The exact formula for Snap scores has never been publicly disclosed, but it's obvious that the scores are used to determine how many snaps you send versus how many you receive back. For some, competing and raising their Snap scores is everything. For others, they're meaningless fun, or interesting statistics that can help you learn how much work you've put in towards communicating on Snapchat. Even still, many users on Snapchat may not think about them at all, and we suppose we can't blame them for, given Snapchat's reticence with explaining the exact meaning.

So, why do we mention Snap scores here when discussing how to figure out if someone follows you back on Snapchat? Because it turns out, Snap scores are the secret key to learning who follows you that you've been unwittingly ignoring this whole time. To learn why, start by sliding to the Friends tab and selecting the search option at the top of the display. Type in the name of your best friend, someone you constantly send Snaps to on the platform. Click on their name, then tap the triple-lined menu icon on the left-side of the top panel to open their profile. Below their display name on Snapchat you'll see their username, as well as their Snap score and any streaks you share with them.

Now, head back to the general Friends tab and reselect the search bar at the top. This time, type in anyone you follow you happens to be a well-known celebrity with a Snapchat account, or an account you follow that you know has public Stories set up on the platform. This will once again open up the Chat screen with this person, and you can load their profile. This time, you'll still see their display name, along with their chosen username on the app. But you'll notice that next to the username, there's no listing for Snap score. No number, no identifier—just a blank space. This is because you aren't mutual friends with that person; instead, you added their account, and can view their public Stories at your own discretion. Basically, you can see them, but your content isn't added to their own feed. You see what they post, but they don't see your content at all, unless it's explicitly directed at them.

How to Check if Someone Deleted You on Snapchat

So, now that you know how to view your friends list inside of Snapchat, and you know how to figure out if someone you follow on Snapchat has followed you back, you can use both of those steps together to learn if someone who used to follow you has deleted you on Snapchat. But be careful; down this path lies grudges and potential unhealthy obsessions.

First, you should search for their name in the Friends list. If they've removed you from their friends list and their snaps and Stories are set to Friends-only, they won't appear on your list at all. This is the easy way to tell if someone has removed you from their account, because you'll likely find that you no longer see them appearing in both your friends listing and in the search results of your profile. However, if they have their Stories set to public, you'll run into more trouble. Because you can see anyone's Snap Stories when the account is set to public, you run into the lack of being able to know for sure, without a doubt, that a friend has removed you from their Snap account.

That is, unless you know to look for their Snap score on their profile. So, if you've stopped seeing a certain friend's name appear in your viewed Stories list on Snapchat, look up their profile to figure out whether they're simply not actively looking at your Stories on the app (and, in turn, are not looking at your Stories on the Snap) or whether they've removed you from the app. If it's the former, you'll still be able to see their Snap score next to their name in their profile. However, if they've removed you from the application, you're not going to see the Snap score appear at all in the profile listing, meaning they've removed you from their list (or never added you back to begin with).

Can You Tell If Someone Has Declined Your Friend Request?

There aren't many direct ways to find out if someone added you back on Snapchat. Unlike on social networks like Facebook, where you receive not only a notification but a message within Facebook Messenger, Snapchat keeps things a bit less direct. Though you'll receive a notification if someone adds you on the platform, you won't be notified when the favor is returned. That said, it's fairly easy to figure out whether or not someone has added you back on the platform, and by using these simple rules, you can figure out whether someone has declined your request.

Your request remains in pending for 48 hours

If you added someone and the status remains pending for two days, it is likely that they either aren't using Snapchat or don't want to be friends. Requests time out after 48 hours so it won't be long until you know for sure.

You can add them again after a couple days

If that 48 hour period has expired, the friend request will disappear. If you go back to your Snapchat menu screen and select Add Friends and are able to add that person again, your original request timed out.

You cannot add them as a friend when selecting them in search

If you select the person from your Snapchat menu screen but tapping the Add icon doesn't do anything, the person has actively blocked you. Snapchat will not allow you to send a friend request if this happens.

***

When you're dealing with social media, it's important to know who has you added on their account and who doesn't. Figuring out who is following you on your profile and who has opted to ignore or unfollow you is an important key to any social network, but Snapchat in particular makes this important, thanks to the disappearing status of most of the content on the application. If you want to make sure one of your friends is actually seeing your content, it's important to know how to look at your friends list and how to determine whether or not someone follows you back on Snapchat.

The app doesn't make it easy, though we aren't quite sure why that's the case, but thanks to the ability to easily check your friend's Snap scores, knowing whether or not you're friends with someone on Snapchat is actually pretty easy to do and knowing the trick to it can make you feel pretty smart. Snap scores may not be considered the most important feature of the app for most people, but when trying to determine who actually follows you on Snapchat, it becomes an important tool in your social media arsenal. So, the next time you aren't sure if someone follows you on Snapchat, don't waste time trying to do the detective work yourself. Instead, check their profile to see if you can see their Snap score, the ultimate key to determining your friends on Snapchat.