How to Check if Someone is Online on Facebook Without Being Friends

Last updated on January 17th, 2023 at 04:02 pm

Facebook is one of the most popular social media sites in the world. People use it all over the globe to stay in touch with each other and keep in touch with the people they care about.

There are many people who love it for its simplicity and convenience. However, some find it difficult to understand how to use it.

How to Check if Someone is Online on Facebook Without Being Friends

This article will guide you on how you can check if someone is online on Facebook without being friends with them.

Contents show

What is Online Status on Facebook and How Does it Work?

Your online status on Facebook is simply your current status. This means that if you’re online right now, it will say “Online” on your status.

You can change this by going to your profile and selecting “Status” on the drop-down menu.

Once you’ve done that, you can select the ‘What’s on my mind” option and update your status. You can also send messages to people via Messenger and share photos or videos via Instagram.

This way, you can get updates from your friends without having to visit their profiles all the time. However, if someone isn’t on your Facebook network, they won’t be able to see this.

You can find out if someone is online by looking at their profile. Simply look for a gray circle with a ‘+’ sign it next to their name.

If it’s there, they are online. If not, then they are not online.

How to Check if Someone is Online on Facebook Without Being Friends

It is not always possible for people to check if someone is online on Facebook without being their friend. However, you can easily find out if someone is online on Facebook by following a simple method.

Go to the “Messages” tab on your Facebook account.

Now scroll down till you find the “Inbox” tab and click on it. This will open your inbox on Facebook. You will see a list of the people who have recently sent you messages.
Click on the name of the person you want to check whether he/she is online or not.
On the next page, you will be able to see the person’s status. If he/she is online, then you will see a green dot, and if he/she is offline, then you will see a gray dot.

How to Check if Someone is Online on Facebook with Third-Party Tools

You can also use third-party tools to check if someone is online. If you know their email address or phone number, you can try getting it from their other social media account.

On the other hand, if you don’t know anyone’s email address or phone number, you can use an app like Friendface to do it for you. It will look for their profile and show you if they are online.

How to Check if Someone is Online on Facebook with Messenger

Another option is to try messaging them on Messenger and see what happens. If it goes through, it will show you their online status on Messenger. If it doesn’t work, they aren’t online.

What Facebook is Doing to Help Users Check Online Status

It’s important to note that Facebook has been testing the ability for people to see each other’s online statuses on Facebook.

You can see someone else’s online status via Facebook search results, as well. This means that as long as you know someone’s name or email address, you can see if they are online or not.

However, these new features are being tested, so you may not see them yet. If you don’t see it, you can try searching again later.

Alternative methods you can use to check if someone is online on Facebook without being friends.

As explained above, if someone is not on your friend or message list, Facebook won’t display their online status due to privacy concerns.

However, you shouldn’t lose hope because there are other options available for you.

To assist you with solutions, we have carried out research and devised strategies that can help you tackle this.

Let’s explore and find out which is the most effective for you:

Have they Posted Something Recently? Check Their Timeline

Have you observed that in someone’s post or comment on Facebook, there is always a time stamp below their name? Have you noticed it?

The fact is that if you check someone’s post a day after they upload it, the date will be displayed.

However, if you check their post in the space of 24 hours, rather than seeing a date, you will likely see a timestamp below their names. For example, “x days ago” or “x minutes”.

If something has been posted by them on Facebook 10 minutes ago, it is very likely that they are currently online, or around 10 minutes.

You should take note of the criteria for this strategy to work, which is: this person has to set their Facebook post privacy to “public” so you can access their posts without being friends.

And these days, lots of Facebook users set their post privacy to “Private”, implying that the method will not likely work.

However, if there is a possibility that their account is set to “public”, finding out their online status will be easy breezy for you.

Check out their latest comments on posts from mutual friends

There’s a possibility since you are very inquisitive about this Facebook user’s online status without being their friend, you must be familiar with them in reality.

And since you have some level of familiarity in real life, there’s a likelihood that you two may have mutual friends.

And, in the event that this mutual friend is on both your and the user’s friend list, you may discover their comments and likes on the mutual friend’s posts.

This is the way the second method is.

While you can’t be sure if someone has liked a Facebook post, it is not the same with comments.

Besides the comments, you will find a time stamp. However, you can only be sure of the precision of the time within the first 24 hours; if that time passes, you will see only: ” (x) d” or “(x) w”

Thus, if you find the user’s Facebook comment under a mutual friend post such as “5 m” beside it, it implies that they posted the comment a few minutes and have been recently online.

Send a message to them

There is still a likelihood that the two methods we have explained above may not properly work.

However, they are beneficial because they can be used to make sure the target user is not aware that you are monitoring their online status.

In contrast, this method in this section will require you to get in touch with them. If that’s not what you are planning to do, we expect you to skip this method.

However, if you are interested in contacting them it implies that you can discover their online status, this method is the most effective solution to this problem.

All that is required of you is to send them a Facebook message. You can do this via Messenger, then check for the Seen marker that shows up below your message, it shows that they are online.

If you utilize the Messenger app on your mobile device, rather than the Seen marker, you will find a small, round thumbnail of their profile photo below your message. This signifies the same thing; the difference is the platform.

Free Facebook Online Checker Tool

With Facebook Online Checker Tools, you can authenticate the identity of the people you encounter in the simplest possible manner.

There are more than 2 billion accounts on Facebook, and some of them are fake.

Studies carried out by the website show that close to 100 million profiles on Facebook are not authentic.

While many of them are harmless accounts with fictitious names for marketing, entertainment and comedy.

Others were set up for malicious, fraudulent or spamming purposes and can be very problematic.

Most of the time, these fake Facebook accounts are complete time wasters.

It is unsurprising if you get dozens of friend requests on Facebook and find it difficult to tell which one is authentic and fake.

The good news is that there are online tools that can easily be used to detect fake accounts to confirm if you are chatting with a fake profile on the website or a real one.

Accfarm.com

This Facebook online status checker is user-friendly and easy to use. It performs all of the hard tasks of authenticating Facebook profiles and accounts for you and keeps you protected.

Mytoolz.net

This Facebook Checker tool assists in validating the list of active accounts and showing you information about the account and their online status.

Conclusion

I hope you that this guide on “how to check if someone is online on Facebook without being their friends”. You can now check out everyone that is online easily.

Also Read: