Picture three posts going up on the same afternoon. One is a can of Olipop on a desk, named in the caption, no tag. One is a haul with a fridge shelf of Poppi. The third is somebody asking her followers for a soda that does not taste like medicine. If you run a soda brand, all three are about your business, and Instagram will show you none of them.
That is the whole idea of this page. There are three kinds of mention worth watching: posts about you, posts about the brands next to you, and posts from people who have not chosen yet. Most consumer brands watch one of them by accident, through notifications, and the other two not at all.
Why most brands watch one of the three, or none
Instagram notifies an account when somebody links it with an @ or tags it in a photo. Nothing else. So the only mentions that arrive on their own are the ones where the poster chose to point at you, which is the smallest and most self-interested slice of the conversation.
A competitor's mentions never notify you, because they are not about you. And a lead mention never names a brand at all, so even a tool that searches every brand name on the app walks straight past it. Each kind needs its own search: your name, somebody else's name, and a need with no name attached.
Brand mentions: the posts that name you
These are posts that say your brand in a caption, a hashtag or a tag. The tagged ones you already see. The untagged ones are the honest ones, written to friends rather than to you, and they take a search to find. We wrote up the four strings to search for untagged posts and the weekly routine that covers all four surfaces, so the short version here: your name as a hashtag, the name with no space, your best-known product on its own, and the name typed as plain words.
What to do with them is less obvious than it sounds. Reply to the questions and the complaints first, because those are the posts where a slow answer costs something. Save the good photos while you can still find them, and ask before you reuse one; there is a whole piece on finding and keeping UGC. Then write down who posted. The handles that mention you twice without being asked are your community, and the list of them is worth more than the count.
Competitor mentions: the posts that name the brand next to you
Every one of these is public and none of them leaves a trace. Their hashtag belongs to nobody, their Tagged tab is open, and searching it is invisible to them. The method is the same four strings, pointed at their name, and the competitor version of the routine takes about five minutes a week.
Read three things in them. The creators who featured a competitor unpaid, who already make content in your category and are the warmest outreach list you will find. The complaints, because a customer annoyed about a competitor's reformulation or delivery times is describing your pitch for you. And the shape of the crowd: if every account posting about Glossier and Rhode looks like the same person, the category is selling to one customer and there may be room beside her.
One trap. Compare your volume against theirs only if you searched both the same way. A brand with a nickname gets found by two strings and a brand without one by a single string, and the gap you measure is about naming, not attention.
Lead mentions: the posts from people who have not chosen yet
This is the one almost nobody watches, and the one closest to a sale. Somebody asks for a deodorant that survives a run, a pan that is not nonstick-coated, a dupe for a blush that keeps selling out. They name a need and no brand, so they are invisible to every search above.
You find these by searching for the question rather than the name: “looking for a”, “any recommendations”, “dupe for”, “where can I buy”, plus your category's words. Then you answer like a person, in public, once. It is slow and manual, and we do not automate it: Monitor Mentions tracks brand and competitor mentions today, not leads. The full method, including the phrases and how to reply without looking like spam, is in how to find customers asking for your product on Instagram.
When your brand name is an ordinary word
All three searches get harder if your name means something else. Away shares its hashtag with every holiday photo on the app, and Method with every post about a technique. For those brands the raw search is mostly noise, and the job becomes filtering: the handle over the hashtag, a second word attached, and a check that each post is about you before it counts. There is a separate guide to monitoring mentions when your brand name is a common word, and if you are still choosing a name, read this one before you file the trademark.
How to set up all three in one weekly hour
Do them in order of how much a missed post costs. Your own mentions first, because an unanswered complaint gets worse by the day. Then competitors, because the useful signal is a change in who posts about them and you only see a change if you look every week. Leads last, in whatever time is left, because they are the slowest to search and the least urgent individually, even though each one is closer to a sale.
Keep one document with three headings and add to it every week: the handles that posted about you, the new accounts posting about each competitor, and the questions people asked in your category. After a month that document will tell you more than any single week's numbers, because the pattern is in what repeats.
The reason this might not work
For a brand that very few people post about yet, the first two searches come back nearly empty, and an hour a week on an empty feed teaches you to stop doing it. In that case lead mentions are the better use of the time, since they exist whether or not anyone has heard of you. And all of this is Instagram only. If your customers talk somewhere else, this is the wrong place to listen, and no amount of searching here will fix that.
What Monitor Mentions does with the first two
Brand and competitor mentions are what we do, on Instagram. Every brand in the catalogue has a public page showing the posts we found, including the untagged ones, with the term that found each post. The Olipop page is a fair example of what a month of mentions looks like. Monitoring a brand puts it under daily collection and emails you new posts; you can watch your own and your competitors' the same way, and one plan covers as many brands as you like. For a brand we do not cover, the live monitor searches a handle and the words you give it while you wait. Lead mentions stay a job for a person with a search bar, for now.