Under a creator's video about her bathroom shelf, somebody asks for a deodorant that does not leave white marks. Under a cookware reel, somebody asks which pan to buy if they hate nonstick coatings. Neither comment names a brand. Both are a person with money, a need and no decision yet, which is the most valuable kind of mention on Instagram and the one no brand-name search will ever find.
Call them lead mentions. They are the third kind of mention worth watching, after the posts about you and the posts about your competitors, and they are found by searching for the question instead of the name.
The phrases buyers use on Instagram
People asking for a product use a small set of phrases, and they fall into three groups.
Asking for a recommendation. Any recommendations for, what is the best, help me find, what do you use for, has anyone tried. These come from people at the start, who know the category and not the brands.
Asking for an alternative. Dupe for, something like, cheaper version of, similar to, but vegan. These come from people who already know a brand and want a different one, which in a crowded aisle is most of the opportunity. Somebody asking for a dupe for a Rhode lip product, or for a pan like the one from Our Place, is telling you the exact product and the price they are measuring you against.
Asking to buy. Where can I buy, link please, where is this from, is this still in stock, does it ship to. These come from people at the end, usually under somebody else's photo, where the person who posted it has no reason to answer.
On their own these phrases match everything on the app. Each one needs a product word: dupe for blush, recommendations sunscreen, where can I buy olive oil. Write ten pairings for your category and you have a search list.
How to search for them by hand today
Instagram's search bar takes plain words, not only hashtags, so type the pairings in as you would say them and read the posts and reels that come back. The results are ranked rather than in date order, so run the same search every week instead of scrolling one search forever.
Then go where the questions are actually asked, which is the comments. Open the five or six creators who post most about your category and read the comments under their recent product posts. That is where the where-is-this-from and is-it-worth-it questions sit, and a creator with a busy comment section cannot answer all of them.
Hashtags help a little. Category tags with a buying word, such as dupe or recommendations attached to your product type, collect some of these posts. Treat them as one more place to look and not the main one, because most people asking a question do not hashtag it.
Finally, read your competitors' comments. Questions under a competitor's post about price, stock, shipping or an ingredient are lead mentions too, aimed at a brand that may not answer. The competitor routine puts you on those posts every week anyway.
How to reply without being spammy
Answer the question they asked, in public, from your brand account, once. Say who you are in the first line, because a brand pretending to be a happy customer is the fastest way to lose the thread. If your product is not the right answer for them, say that, and say what is. Other people read the replies, and the brand that told somebody to buy something else is the one they remember.
Do not paste the same reply across thirty posts. Instagram's community guidelines ask accounts not to post repetitive comments or repeatedly contact people for commercial purposes without their consent, and a brand doing either looks like a bot to everybody watching. Do not move to DMs unless they ask. And leave the discount code out of the first reply; a code where an answer should be reads as an ad.
Some questions are not yours to answer. A creator's comment section is their space, and on a post about a competitor, jumping in with your own product is rude rather than clever. Reply where the person asked an open question to everybody, and leave the rest.
What to measure
Only what you can count. Questions found, replies posted, replies that got an answer back, and the visits or orders you can trace to a reply, which is easiest with a link or a landing page used nowhere else. Keep the counts per search phrase. After a few weeks some phrases will keep turning up real buyers and others only noise, and the list should shrink to the ones that work.
Do not invent a conversion rate from a handful of replies. A few weeks of small counts is a sign of which phrases to keep, not a forecast.
What Monitor Mentions does and does not do here
Monitor Mentions tracks brand mentions and competitor mentions on Instagram: posts that name a brand, including the ones that never tag it. It does not find lead mentions. A lead mention usually names no brand, so it falls outside what we search, and everything on this page is a manual practice, not a feature.
Where we help is the other two. Every brand in the catalogue has a public page with the posts we found, so the Native page shows who is already posting about a deodorant brand without you searching for it, and the creators on it are the comment sections worth reading for questions. The live monitor also searches the hashtags and phrases you give it, which you can use to look at how a category word is being used; it will show you posts, and the judgement of which ones are buyers is still yours.