Search #away on Instagram and the results mean what the word means to everybody else: holidays, trips, time off. Somewhere in there are posts about Away, the luggage brand, and nothing about the hashtag page helps you tell which. A brand named after a common word is not hidden on Instagram. It is drowned.
The fix is a change in what you trust. The bare word is the worst search you have, so it goes last, and everything before it is a term that only you can own.
Which brands have this problem
More than you would guess, and some of them are big. Method shares its name with every post about a technique, a workout or a recipe. Coach shares it with every football, tennis and life coach on the app. Mango is a fruit before it is a fashion retailer, and Plum, the Mumbai beauty brand, is a fruit and a colour. Recess is a school break, Ritual is anybody's morning routine, and Wild, the refillable deodorant, is every hiking photo posted this weekend.
None of this is a verdict on the brands, and the name may cost them nothing at the till. What it costs is visibility in the one place a customer's post could be found, and that cost is paid by whoever is trying to count their mentions, every week, for as long as the name exists. We made the naming argument in your brand name decides how often you get mentioned. This page is for the brands that already have the name.
Handle, hashtag or name: which to trust
Three kinds of term find a brand on Instagram, and with a common-word name they are not equal.
The handle is the strong one. Instagram issues each handle once, so a post that tags @away or types @methodproducts is pointing at that account and nothing else. Your Tagged tab and your mentions are the cleanest feed you have. They are also the smallest, because most people do not tag, so they cannot be the whole picture.
The name with a second word is the useful middle. Your name joined to what you sell: away luggage, method soap, coach bag. Each pairing shrinks the noise and costs you some reach, since plenty of real customers type the bare word and nothing else. Try the pairings your customers actually use, which you only learn by reading what they write. Product names help most here, because a product line is usually a coined word even when the company name is not.
The bare word is the weak one. Search it, but read it as a pile to sort rather than a count. Most of what comes back is about the word, and a number that mixes the two tells you nothing about the brand.
Exclusion terms, done by hand
Instagram has no minus operator. You cannot search #mango and drop the smoothie bowls. So exclusion becomes a habit you do while reading, and it gets fast once the list exists.
Write down the other meanings of your name, then the words that come with each one. For Mango that is smoothie, tropical, fruit, recipe, tree. For Coach it is team, season, practice, client, mindset. For Away it is beach, holiday, getaway, vacation. When a caption matches a word on that list and nothing about your brand, skip it without opening it. The list grows every week you read, and after a few weeks most of the noise sorts itself on sight.
How to check a post is actually about you
Before a post goes in your count, it needs one of three things. It tags your account. The caption names your product or category beside the brand name. Or the photo shows your packaging. If none of the three is there, it is about the word, and it stays out however flattering it would look in a report.
This matters most when you compare yourself with a competitor. A brand with a coined name like Olipop gets a clean hashtag, and a brand with a common word gets a dirty one. Compare raw hashtag counts between the two and you have measured the names, not the brands. Count only what passed the check, on both sides, or do not compare.
How Monitor Mentions handles a common-word name
We do not pretend the problem is solved. Every term we search for a brand is graded strong, medium or weak. A handle starts strong, because it belongs to one account. A word on our list of ordinary words, like away, plum, method or wild, starts weak, which means expect hits that have nothing to do with the brand. An operator can change a grade, and that decision sticks.
Each brand page lists the terms under Watching with their grade, and every post in the feed carries the term that found it. With a free account you can filter the feed by that term, so a reader can look at only the posts that tagged the handle and leave the bare word out. Anyone can suggest a better term from the brand page, which is often how we hear about the hashtag a brand's customers actually use. A person reads every suggestion before anything changes.
What we do not do is delete posts automatically for looking off-topic. A filter that guesses wrong removes real mentions without telling anybody, and with a common-word name a missing mention is the thing you are trying to avoid. The label lets you decide. For the wider routine of watching your own, your competitors' and your category's posts, see the three mentions every brand should monitor on Instagram.