How we count mentions
A mention count on this site is the number of posts our searches found. It is a sample of what was posted, not the number of times a brand was mentioned on Instagram, TikTok or Reddit.
What we search
For every brand we track we run the same few searches on Instagram: the hashtags we watch for it, the posts that tag its own account, and, for the brands people watch most, its name in captions. We keep the public posts by other accounts that match. The brand's own posts are never counted.
A short list of brands also gets one TikTok search and one Reddit search a day. Those counts come from different searches, so they are never added to the Instagram figure.
How often
Brands a paying account monitors are searched every day. The rest of the catalogue is searched on a cycle, weekly for the brands read most and up to once a month for the quietest. A post published between two searches is caught only if it is still among the recent results the next time we look.
Why the count is a sample
Each search returns a limited number of recent posts. A brand with thousands of posts a week outruns that, so we see a slice of them; a quiet brand may be caught almost in full. We also read captions, hashtags and tags only: a brand said out loud in a reel, shown on screen, posted in a story or on a private account is not something we can see.
So when a page says we found 93 posts mentioning a brand this week, it means 93 posts turned up in our searches. The brand may well have been tagged many thousands of times.
How to read it
Read a count against something measured the same way. The same brand against its own previous weeks shows whether the conversation is growing. Brands in one category against each other show who leads it, which is what share of voice and our rankings are. A brand searched daily shows more of what was posted than one searched monthly, which is why a brand page says how often that brand is collected.
The monthly reports use a narrower count again: only posts that tag the brand's own account, so an ordinary word in a hashtag cannot lift a brand up the table.
What is not a sample
Follower counts, engagement and growth are read from each account's own profile and stored with the date they were read. Where we have not read something, the page shows a dash rather than an estimate. The rest of the method is on how it works and about.
Questions about the counts
Is a mention count the number of times a brand was mentioned on Instagram?
No. It is the number of public posts by other accounts that our searches found in the window shown. Each search returns a limited number of recent posts, and quieter brands are searched less often, so a busy brand can be mentioned far more often than we count. The count is a sample.
Then what is the count good for?
Comparison. The same brand is searched the same way week after week, and brands in a category are searched the same way as each other, so a rise, a fall, a share of voice or a rank among peers means something even though the total does not.
Are follower counts a sample too?
No. Followers are read from the account's own profile and stored with the date they were read, so they are the real figure on that date.