What we collect, and what we tell you
Who is talking about a brand on Instagram, including the posts that never tag it, and the creators behind them. Start with your own brand.
What gets collected
One source, covered properly, because most tools in this category answer “everything” and cover each source thinly.
Instagram mentions. Public posts that name the brand, collected by hashtag and keyword rather than by notification, which is the only way to catch the majority that never tag the account. Each one arrives with the account that posted it, the caption, and what it earned.
Underneath them sit the numbers that say whether a mention moved anything: follower change, engagement against your category median, and where you sit in your competitive set.
You can see this working without an account. The board of trending brand mentions on Instagram is the same collection, published: one row per post, ranked by the engagement it gained this week rather than by its total.
How collection runs
1. Find your brand. If it is already in the 855 brands we cover, it has a public page with current numbers on it. If not, tell us and we will add it.
2. We collect on a schedule. Every brand is measured roughly every 14 days. Brands somebody is watching are measured daily.
3. You get told, with context. Mentions arrive by email next to the figures that say whether they mattered, not a bare alert with no baseline.
The mentions that never tag you
This is the single biggest gap in most brand monitoring setups. If you rely on Instagram's own notifications, you see @-mentions and nothing else, and @-mentions are the minority. A caption that names your brand without linking it, a hashtag used without a tag, a story about a product with your name typed in: none of it fires a notification, and all of it is a mention.
It is also why so many brand and comms teams believe their brand is quieter than it is. The conversation is happening; the notification system just is not built to surface it.
One limit, stated plainly: we read captions, not audio. A reel where somebody says your brand out loud and never types it is a mention we do not catch, and the same goes for a name that only appears on screen inside the video. Transcribing every video would cost more than this product does. If it is not in the caption or the hashtags, we did not see it.
When this is the wrong tool
If you need the whole web watched, an enterprise listening suite is the right shape and costs accordingly. If the question is commercial rather than conversational, meaning what is selling at what price on which shop, that is a different category again and Charm.io and Particl answer it where we do not. We compare ourselves against 18 other tools, each one including where it beats us.
Free, and what a subscription adds
Every brand page is free to read without an account, followers, engagement against the category median, comparisons and AI visibility. What a subscription changes is the clock: unwatched brands are collected every 14 days and watched brands are shown publicly 14 days behind, so subscribing to a brand is what makes it daily and live for you. $49/year per brand, or $79 once. Full pricing →
Brands we monitor
Trending mentions →Questions
What is the difference between brand monitoring and social listening?
In practice they overlap heavily. Social listening usually describes the broad, enterprise version, every network plus the open web, with sentiment and audience segmentation on top. Brand monitoring is often used for the narrower job: catching the mentions and knowing whether the volume is normal. The distinction that matters more than the label is scope: how many sources you actually need watched, and how deeply.
How much does brand monitoring cost?
Enterprise listening platforms are typically quote-only and land in the thousands per month. Mid-market tools generally run from tens to low hundreds per month. Monitor Mentions is $49/year per brand, or $79 once, because it monitors two sources properly rather than the whole internet thinly.
Do you catch a brand mentioned inside a video?
Only if it is written down. We read captions and hashtags, not audio, so a reel where somebody says your brand out loud and never types it is a mention we miss, and so is a name that only appears on screen inside the video. Transcribing every video would cost more than this product does. If it is not in the caption or the hashtags, we did not see it.
Is there free brand monitoring?
Google Alerts is free and covers pages Google has indexed, which leaves social platforms almost entirely uncovered. Every one of the 855 brands here has a free public page with its current numbers, no account needed. A subscription is what puts a brand under daily collection.