How to find contacts on Instagram

Georgina Smith
Instagram logo on phone

If you’ve recently started a new Instagram account, or are just looking for some more people to follow, finding your contacts can be a great way to connect with your real-life friends on the app. Here’s how.

Instagram has been one of the biggest social media platforms in the world for years now, and is a place where millions of users share snippets of their daily lives through pictures and videos.

There are also plenty of celebrities and influencers who use the platform, and often end up garnering millions of followers on their account.

If you’ve recently started an account on Instagram, or you just want to connect with more users, it can be helpful to use your contacts to connect with people that you know in real life.

Here’s how to do it.

Instagram logo on a pink background
Instagram is a place to connect with your friends and followers.

How to find your contacts on Instagram

Fortunately, to make things easy, Instagram has a function that allows you to easily find out whether any of your contacts have an Instagram account.

To use this feature, simply do as follows.

  1. Open Instagram.
  2. Go to your profile page.
  3. In the top right, click the three lines, then ‘Settings.’
  4. Click ‘Follow and invite friends.’
  5. Tap ‘Follow contacts,’ then ‘Continue.’

From there you should be able to access your contacts, as long as you have approved it in your device settings.

According to Instagram: “We’ll use your contacts to help you find people you know and help them find you. Your contacts will be periodically synced and stored on our servers. You can turn off syncing at any time in settings.”


If you want to know more about how to use Instagram, you can check out our other guides here:

How to link your Instagram account to TikTokHow to see your first-liked Instagram postHow to switch Instagram feed to chronological orderHow to re-share a post to your Story on InstagramHow to make money on InstagramHow to hide likes on Instagram

About The Author

Georgina was formerly an entertainment writer for Dexerto. She covered all aspects of influencer culture on TikTok and more, including creators such as Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae. She also wrote about hit reality shows such as Love Island and Below Deck.