Four places, and you have to check all four: your Tagged tab, your mentions in notifications, a hashtag search for your brand name and its variants, and a plain text search of the brand name. Instagram hands you the first two. The last two you go and get, and for most consumer brands they hold more posts than the first two.
The two Instagram gives you
Open your profile and tap the Tagged tab. Every post where somebody linked your account in the photo is there. Then open your notifications and read the mentions: those are captions and comments where somebody typed your @handle. Both are complete, both are free, and both share a single limitation that decides everything else on this page. They only contain people who linked you.
The two you have to go and find
Search your brand name as a hashtag. Then search it again with no space, then with the word your customers actually use. A brand like Dr. Squatch is tagged as #drsquatch, #squatch and #drsquatchsoap by different people on the same afternoon, and each of those is a separate search.
Then search the brand name as plain text and read the captions. This is the step almost nobody runs, and it is where the posts live that say the name without linking it: my new Graza just arrived, obsessed with this Poppi flavour. Real posts, real reach, no notification, no Tagged tab, invisible from inside your own account.
The twenty-minute weekly version
Tagged tab, then mentions, then each hashtag variant, then the name as text. Save the good ones to a collection as you go, because you will not find them again. For one brand with a handful of keywords that is about twenty minutes, once a week, and it is genuinely enough for a brand in its first year.
Where it stops working is not the twenty minutes. It is that hashtag results are ranked and truncated, so a post from three weeks ago is effectively gone, and you have no way of knowing what you did not see. The manual method is good at this morning and bad at last month.
Do the manual version first
Run it for three or four weeks before you pay anybody, including us. It tells you the one thing that decides whether monitoring is worth money to you: whether people are posting about you at a volume that makes checking a chore. If you find two posts a month, a tool is solving a problem you do not have. If you find fifteen and know you missed more, that is the moment.
We track this across hundreds of consumer brands, and the shape is consistent: the tagged posts are the ones the brand already knows about, and the untagged ones are the surprise. If you want to see what a month of a brand's untagged mentions looks like before doing any of this yourself, the Liquid Death page is public and shows the posts themselves rather than a count.