Instagram Notifications, all you’ll ever need to know about them

To get the absolute best results out of Instagram you have to know how to use each of its features. This means you need a solid growth strategy, but you also have to keep an eye on your Instagram notifications. Do you use them to keep track of what happens on your page?

If not, we’re here to get you all the information you need, from how to toggle them on or off to troubleshooting issues you might encounter.

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Why should you use Instagram Notifications?

This feature is designed to help you keep track of everything that happens in your account. Notifications show up to you for several different reasons. You can check things such as:

• Direct messages you receive from people you know or from your followers.
• Posts from accounts you turned notifications on.
• New followers!
• Live streams and IGTV from accounts you follow.
• All sorts of notifications from Instagram.

Notifications are there to improve your experience with the app, and I know that sometimes a bunch of notifications can be a bit annoying. The good part is, you can customize what you get notified for.

How notifications work on a fresh account

Be that a fresh account or if you never customized your notification settings, here’s how it works from scratch.

Instagram will notify you of every single thing that happens by default. This includes direct messages, mentions, new comments, etc., you get the drill.

As Instagram is constantly releasing new features, the number of notifications you get is constantly growing, so if you’re like me, you’ll want to filter what you get notified for.

If you head to the notifications tab on your Instagram settings, you can toggle those on or off. For example, you can turn off notifications for new comments if your page gets tons of daily comments from users. I mean, you know you get tons of those, so you can just check that at your own pace without disrupting your day.

How to toggle Instagram notifications

If you want a day off from your page, you can easily turn all notifications off. Here’s how you do it:

The easy way

This works on both Android and iOS.

• Open Instagram.
• Tap your picture on the bottom right of the app.
• Tap the three lines on the top right and hit Settings.
• Select Notifications.
• Toggle Pause All.

Note that if you toggle Instagram notifications this way, some might slip through as it happened to me a few times.

If you want to make sure nothing bothers you, check below.

Android

• Open your Android settings page.
• Tap on Apps.
• Find Instagram on the list.
• Select Notifications.
• You’ll see the toggle button, just tap it and you’re good (just remember to toggle them back, or you’ll miss all the good stuff.)

iOS

• Open your iPhone settings.
• Scroll down and select Notifications.
• Select Instagram.
• You’ll see the toggle button to Allow Notifications, just hit it to choose what you want to do.

Customizing Notifications

Now, you can customize what you see or not, and that is super easy to do on the Instagram app.

• Go to your Settings on Instagram.
• Choose Notifications.

Here you’ll see each one of the categories of Instagram notifications you can get. You can select each one of them and customize it as you want. Wanna be notified only by actions done by people you follow? Done. Do you want to turn off Instagram product announcement notifications? You got it.

I recommend that you go through each category even if you don’t plan on customizing that much. This way you’ll get familiarized with what you can change, and if eventually, you need it, you’ll know what to do.

Turning on/off notifications from a specific account

When you do this, you can choose to get notified when a person or brand posts specific content. For example, every time they post a story you’ll get notified, but you can choose not to receive those when they post on their feed and vice versa.

• Go to their profile.
• Tap  in the top right.
• Tap  next to Posts, Stories, Reels or Videos to turn notifications on or off.
• Or tap  next to Live Videos and select any notification option.

At the moment, there is no way to do this in bulk, so if you want to toggle notifications for multiple accounts, you’ll have to do it one by one.

Your Instagram notifications are not working

First of all, remember to check if you haven’t disabled notifications on your phone settings as we mentioned before.

If that’s not the case, then we might have an issue causing your notifications to behave like this. There are a few things we can do about that.

Clearing your cache and data

If you’re not receiving notifications or notifications seem to be delayed try this:

• Open the Apps section in your phone settings.
• Long press on the Instagram app or select the app advanced settings.
• Press App Info then Storage and Cache.
• Clear both by tapping the respective buttons.
• Its always good to restart your phone or at least the Instagram app after doing this.

Update your phone

Sometimes Instagram releases an update and there are compatibility issues with your phone’s firmware version.

• Head to your phone settings.
• Select System.
• Choose System Update.

If there are any updates available, run them and things will possibly go back to normal.

Reinstall the app

I know this might sound silly, but it does work from time to time.

Here are some quick links if you need them:

Download Instagram on Android and iOS.

Use your notifications in your favor

To wrap up, now you know how to manage your notifications with ease. This is one of the most basic features on Instagram, but many users don’t customize it and end up stressing out over getting too many notifications. This solves that problem and many others.

I for once, prefer to have push notifications set up only for the essentials. Comments and direct messages are up all the time, but as enjoyable as it is, getting likes on pictures every few seconds can and will surely clutter your notification tray.

We hope that you enjoyed this article and the many others we’ve published recently. We’ve covered a ton of subjects from growing your audience using polls to using reels for that same purpose.

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