What Monitor Mentions is, and what it refuses to do
A small, self-funded product that tracks 855 consumer brands on Instagram, followers, engagement, growth, and mentions, and publishes most of it for free.
Why it exists
Most brands answer “how are we doing on Instagram?” by opening their own analytics, which can only ever show them themselves. The question they actually mean is compared to whom, and answering that means measuring a set of brands the same way, on the same schedule, for long enough that the trend is real.
Enterprise listening suites do this, behind a demo call and a five-figure contract. Google Alerts does a thin version of it for free. There was not much in between for a mid-market consumer brand that wants to know whether it is gaining on its competitive set this quarter.
Where the numbers come from
Public Instagram profile data, fetched per account through a data provider and stored as a dated reading, one row per account per day it is read. Engagement rate is (average likes + average comments) ÷ followers, the standard formula, so accounts of different sizes stay comparable. Growth is the change between the first and most recent snapshot we hold, always quoted with the window it covers.
Every table on the site is rebuilt from those snapshots rather than maintained by hand, which is why a list here can be more current than a competitor's article that was last edited in December.
Three rules we hold to
Nothing is estimated. Where we have not measured something, the page shows an em dash. Not a zero, not an industry-average placeholder, not a plausible-looking guess. A brand we have never read is left out of a ranking rather than given a number it did not earn.
The formula is published. The brand health score shows its four components and their weights on the same page as the result, and marks any score built from incomplete data. A score whose weighting is a secret cannot be argued with, which is a weakness dressed up as authority.
The price is on the site. $49/year for one brand, less per brand as you add more, and you can read the whole pricing page without talking to anyone. There is no sales call, because there is no salesperson.
What it does not do
It is Instagram only. Not TikTok, not YouTube, not the open web. If you need every channel monitored at once, a broader tool is the right answer and we say so on every comparison page, including which ones we would recommend instead.
It also does not publish, schedule, or reply. It measures. If your problem is getting posts out the door, that is a different category of tool.
What is free
Every one of the 855 brands has a public page with current followers, engagement and category rank, plus a daily board of the posts mentioning them, head-to-head comparisons, and a glossary of every metric used. No account, no card, no login. Paying adds daily tracking, follower history, post-by-post analytics and mention alerts for the specific brands you choose.
Get in touch
Corrections are welcome and acted on. A wrong Instagram handle or a brand filed in the wrong category is worth telling us about. So is a brand you think is missing. Email hello@monitormentions.com.