Brand mentions: what they are and how to track them

What are brand mentions?

Any public reference to a brand made by someone other than the brand. On the web that is a news article, a review, a forum thread. On Instagram it comes in four shapes: a tag on the photo, an @handle in the caption, a hashtag, and the name typed as plain words.

Only the first two notify you. The other two are where most of the conversation sits, and nothing tells you they happened. The short definition lives in the glossary; the difference between a tag and a mention is in tag vs mention.

Why B2B teams track brand mentions

A creator posts about your product without being paid. That is a piece of content you could license and a person you could sign, and the only way you hear about it is if somebody is looking.

The same search catches a complaint while it is one post rather than a thread, a competitor launch the week it lands, and the press you need for the monthly report. Count the mentions for you and your competitors on the same schedule and you have share of voice, the number a brand director actually gets asked for.

Agencies do the same job across a client list, which is why per-brand pricing gets expensive quickly and why the brand count on a plan matters as much as the price.

How to track brand mentions, three ways

1. By hand

Check your notifications and the Tagged tab on your Instagram profile. Search your hashtag. Search your name in quotes on Google. It is free and it works for a week. It stops working the first time you are on holiday, and nothing is kept, so there is no last month to compare against.

2. With Google Alerts

Go to google.com/alerts, type the brand name in quotes, and open Show options. You pick how often (as it happens, at most once a day, or at most once a week), the sources (Automatic, News, Blogs, Web, Video, Books, Discussions, Finance), the language, the region, and whether you want only the best results or all of them. Then Create Alert. Google says you will “get emails whenever we find matching search results.”

3. With a brand monitoring tool

A tool runs the searches on a schedule, keeps every result, tells you which ones are new, and lets you run the same searches for competitors. The differences between tools are mostly where they look and how they charge. The buyer's guide to brand mention tools goes through both.

Google Alerts for brand mentions: where it falls short

Google's help page describes Alerts as emails for when “new results for a topic show up in Google Search.” That is the whole scope. A mention reaches an alert only after Google has crawled it, indexed it and treated it as a new result.

There is no Instagram source to pick. The sources list stops at the eight above. A caption that names your brand, a hashtag post, a tag: none of it reaches an alert unless it first turns up in Google Search, and Google does not say which posts do.

An alert is also an email of links. It does not count them or chart them, so the question a brand team gets asked, more or fewer than last month, is answered by whoever kept the emails. For press and blog coverage Alerts is genuinely fine and costs nothing. We compare it with what we do in Google Alerts vs Monitor Mentions.

How Monitor Mentions tracks brand mentions on Instagram

For each brand we search its hashtag and the posts that tag its account. Higher-priority brands also get the name searched as words in captions, which is the only way to find “Liquid Death” typed with the space in it, and Instagram's own keyword suggestions, which a person approves before they are searched. Every post carries the term that found it.

Open the Olipop or Rare Beauty page to see what that produces: the posts, who wrote them, what they earned, and how the brand compares with its category. Or start from the trending mentions board, which ranks this week's posts by the engagement they gained.

Brands nobody is watching are collected about every 14 days. A brand on the paid plan is searched every six hours, and the new posts arrive by email. Your competitors are monitored the same way as you, because nothing needs you to own the account.

Two limits, stated plainly. For social posts we cover Instagram only. And we read captions and hashtags, not audio, so a reel where somebody says Liquid Death out loud and never types it is a mention we miss. Our counts are a floor.

AI assistants are the other place your name now comes up without a tag. How we track what ChatGPT and Gemini say is in AI brand mentions, and the Instagram side in more depth is in Instagram mentions.