How to Track Instagram Mentions? [2024]

Every Instagram mention of your brand is a unique chance to show up to your potential customers. How can you leverage mentions to support your marketing efforts and help you grow?

There is one undeniable fact – social media reach matters. And with 2.4 billion users, Instagram remains one of the top social platforms in the world.

The power of its reach is unquestionable. For example, only in the last 30 days, Netflix received almost 150,000 mentions on Instagram. And these mentions appeared over 7 billion times all over the platform.

It means that, on average, Netflix’s mentions reached every Instagram user 3 times in just one month. Impressive!

Of course, not every company can be as huge as Netflix. But even a medium-sized brand should make informed & data-driven decisions to use its potential fully.

In this article, I will explain what mentions on Instagram are and how to track them – both manually and with the support of a media monitoring tool.

Ready? So, let’s go!

Table of contents:

• What are Instagram mentions?
• How to track Instagram mentions?
  • Manual tracking
  • Using a social media monitoring tool
• How to analyze Instagram mentions to gain insights?
• Conclusion

What are Instagram mentions?

Instagram mention is a situation when another Instagram profile talks about a brand, product, or service. Technically, mentioning someone means referencing a username in a post, story, reel, live video, or comment using the “@” symbol just before a username.

From a marketing perspective, mentions are among the most important Instagram features and metrics regarding a brand’s online presence and reputation. They draw attention to your profile, increase your visibility, and create more opportunities to interact with your customers and followers.

Most people incorrectly treat mentions and tags as synonyms. To avoid your confusion, I will briefly clarify the difference between tag vs mention on Instagram.

Tagging on Instagram means indicating the person or brand directly on reels, photos, and videos. The tag is visible only if you tap on the visual element of the content. Only the content author can tag.

Moreover, all reels, photos, and videos you’re tagged in are stored on a separate tab on your Instagram profile (on the right, just above the feed). It’s a kind of user-generated content gallery.

Ok, let’s go back to mentions. What if someone uses your brand’s or profile name without typing “@” at the beginning?

Such a situation is called an untagged mention. Unfortunately, in this case, you will not receive any notification in your Instagram app.

But I have great news!

Although Instagram features don’t allow you to track untagged mentions, you can discover them with the help of social media monitoring tools.

Let’s take the example of the Brand24 tool. In addition to many other features, this social listening tool is designed to identify mentions (both tagged and untagged) in Instagram posts, videos, reels, and hashtags.

Using it gives you an invaluable opportunity to control and manage your Instagram reputation. Besides, you can react to potential negative comments & crises that you’d not be aware of.

Thanks to tracking mentions on Instagram, you get a lot of benefits:

• More control over your reputation
• Better understanding your followers’ and customers’ needs
• Making more accurate & data-driven decisions about your social media content strategy
• Instant detection of reputation crises to prevent them from escalating
• More effective competitor analysis and being up to date with industry trends

How to track Instagram mentions?

There are two main ways to track mentions on Instagram:

1. Instagram app & Meta Business Suite tracking
2. Using an external social media monitoring tool

01 Manual tracking

First, I’ll show you how to find Instagram mentions in a native app.

Open your Instagram app and ensure you are on the home page by tapping the house icon in the bottom left.

In the top right corner, you’ll notice a heart icon. Once you tap on it, it brings you to your “Notifications” view. To filter the view to mentions, click “Tags & mentions” and tap “Apply”. Here, you’ll see all mentions of your profile from the last 30 days and older.

If you want to receive notifications each time your profile is mentioned, you must manage your account privacy settings.

Tap on your avatar picture on the bottom right. Then, click the drop-down menu icon on the top left corner and choose “Settings and Privacy”.

Once you’re there, find “Tags and mentions” and tap on it. Here, you’ll see all the tags and mentions settings.

If you want to allow all the Instagram users to mention you, mark “Allow mentions from everyone” and “Allow people to boost stories they mention you in” in the section “Who can @mention you”.

Unfortunately, the Instagram app doesn’t provide detailed mention analytics. All you can see is who mentioned you, where you were mentioned (comment, post, reel, story), and when it happened.

Besides, the Instagram app won’t notify you about untagged mentions.

Manual tracking is a very time-consuming process. It requires analyzing each mention separately and supporting your efforts with an external spreadsheet program, like Excel.

The alternative way to discover mentions about your profile is through Instagram and Facebook native analytics tool – Meta Business Suite.

Open the tool and click on “Content” on the left menu. You’ll see plenty of new options. Choose “Mentions & tags”.

In this view, you can see all the user-generated Instagram and Facebook mentions about your profile. And that’s pretty it.

Meta Business Suite’s mentions dashboard doesn’t provide any analytics. You can see posts that mention you in a random order and some basic details. If you have connected your Instagram and Facebook accounts, there is no way to filter view to one platform only.

02 Using a social media monitoring tool

A social media monitoring tool is software designed to track, collect, and analyze mentions & all discussions across major social media platforms. It helps you stay updated on conversations about a brand, service, product, person, or any topic that matters to you in real time.

With top-quality social listening tools like Brand24, you get dozens of valuable insights about your Instagram mentions:

• Their number & reach
• Sentiment analysis (positive, negative, or neutral)
• Filters by date, sentiment, intent, influencer score, and many more
• Advanced search bar

The best tools can monitor public mentions on multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, X (Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, Quora, Telegram, and Twitch.

Along with mentions, such tools are great for hashtag analysis, understanding your online presence, and having control of your reputation.

A few days ago, Brand24 introduced a new Mention’s Tab feature – the Anomaly Detector.

This AI solution automatically identifies any unusual changes in your project (like sudden reach spikes) and scans the web to discover why. Let me show you an example.

The Anomaly Detector discovered the unexpected 17% increase in Netflix mentions on Instagram (and other social media) on January 23rd.

The AI feature identified that it was caused by the news that a very popular wrestling program – WWE’s ‘Raw’ – will move to Netflix.

Such a brief explanation is a very useful & time-saving feature for mention analysis.

Another Brand24 feature that is utterly helpful for tracking and analyzing mentions is the Comparison tab.

With “Compare periods” you can check the progress of your brand mentions by comparing them to analogic periods. 

Thanks to this feature, you know if your Instagram mentions volume grows, the sentiment changes, and which social platforms should be your primary concern.

Filters allow you to make an in-depth analysis of your Instagram mentions. Discover the total number of mentions in a given period, their reach, the percentage of positive, negative, or neutral sentiment, and their estimated value.

As you can see, Netflix’s last period performance was worse than the previous one – at least in the case of Instagram mentions.

Benefits of tracking mentions using an advanced Instagram monitoring tool:

• Deep-down insights into your mentions volume and reach
• Tracking both tagged & untagged mentions
• Understanding the sentiment of your brand mentions
• Quick reaction in the event of a sudden brand reputation crisis
• Improving your marketing & communication strategy thanks to reliable and real-time data
• Saving time with dashboards and AI-driven solutions

How to analyze Instagram mentions to gain insights?

As you can see, Instagram mentions can be valuable data sources and greatly support your marketing efforts.

But how not to drown in a sea of data? Is there any way to gain practical and actionable insights without spending many hours on analysis?

Don’t worry! Dashboards and AI features are coming to your rescue!

Brand24’s Mention Analysis is a tab providing you with a general overview of your mentions. Here, you can check the total number of social media mentions, their reach, and how your mentions perform compared to other projects.

Moreover, you can discover trending hashtags related to your niche, the most active countries, top phrases that shape the context of a discussion around your brand, and much more.

Besides, Mention Analysis allows you to benchmark your brand awareness by checking your Presence Score. Just below, you can check your Reputation Score compared to other brands.

AI Insights feature is invaluable in finding patterns and correlations from a bird’s eye view. You can see how AI algorithms interpret your brand mentions and what opportunities they identify.

Alongside Insights, Trends, and actionable Recommendations, you’ll see charts and metrics summarising your mentions number and reach. All of this is meant to save your time.

Conclusion

Tracking Instagram mentions should be a part of your marketing strategy, no matter your brand or company size. They give you a lot of valuable insights you can use to adjust your communication and decide where you should pivot your marketing efforts.

Generally, if you get a few mentions a month, manual tracking & analysis could be enough. You just need to accept that it will give you only some basic insights.

However, if your brand generates hundreds or thousands of Instagram mentions, you should seriously consider a professional tool. It allows you to analyze mentions on a level impossible to reach with native Instagram solutions.

Final thoughts:

• Monitoring and analyzing mentions can give you a lot of data if you do it correctly
• Instagram mentions can play a vital role in your communication & social media strategy
• Manual tracking of mentions on Instagram is limited to some basic features
• Professional tools can track both tagged and untagged Instagram mentions
• Mentions volume and reach inform you about your brand’s Instagram performance in a given period

Ready to start a new level of Instagram mentions analysis? Start a 14-day free trial!