Instagram Monitoring: The Full Guide for Tracking Your Brand

Statista reported that 80% of marketing professionals surveyed said they used Instagram in their digital marketing campaigns.

Two things in particular make Instagram attractive to digital marketers:

1. The app has a globe-spanning user base, with 2 billion monthly active users of all ages, genders, and content preference types.
2. The app prioritizes photo and video content in the form of Carousels, Stories, and Reels. These are ideal mediums for brand and product promotion.

Obtaining the data required to tap into Instagram’s user base and visual potential doesn’t occur in a vacuum. To do it, marketers need monitoring tools.

In this blog, we’ll help you understand what Instagram monitoring tools do and how to extract actionable insights to help you conquer the world’s third most popular social network for your brand.

What is Instagram Monitoring and How Does it Work?

Instagram monitoring, often referred to as Instagram tracking, means using real-time digital analytics tools to track conversations about your brand on the Instagram app, including private interactions through Instagram direct messages, your competitors’ performance, and industry trends.

The goal of Instagram monitoring is to understand your audience, engage in relevant conversations, and keep up with their interests and content preferences.

You can post better content and further your brand objectives when you understand who your followers are and how to generate their engagement.

The Role of Instagram Monitoring in Brand Strategy

Instagram monitoring is also critical to helping you figure out your brand strategy.

For those who aren’t aware, a brand strategy is a plan for getting your values, beliefs, and promises across to your target audience.

Essentially, it’s the process of using your public image to shape how your followers feel about you and then leveraging that perception to pursue the objectives we mentioned above.

Monitoring strategies like counting brand mentions and analyzing public sentiment enable you to see how your current brand strategy works. This data, in turn, informs you where you should course-correct to improve your target audience’s impression of you and your business.

You can certainly implement an initial brand strategy without Instagram monitoring. But if you want to manage your online reputation effectively and respond quickly to brand image problems as they arise, monitoring is a key part of that process.

Setting Monitoring Goals

To get the most out of Instagram monitoring, lay the groundwork by defining your objectives. What do you want to get out of this process?

Not all data is useful. You need to determine what data to analyze and for what purpose. Use the following tips to start brainstorming potential objectives for your Instagram presence.

Brand awareness vs. engagement vs. sales: What are you monitoring for?

Typically, Instagram creators and brands pursue one of three goals when Instagram monitoring:

• Brand awareness: Increasing the public’s awareness of your brand can open up higher conversion rates, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing opportunities.
• Engagement: Raising your engagement rates (i.e., likes, comments, and shares) can increase your organic growth rate and give you a starting point for driving conversions.
• Sales: Increasing sales via Instagram will raise your overall revenue, allowing you to scale your business profitably.

Aligning Instagram monitoring goals with overall business objectives

If you’re uncertain which objectives to focus on, consider aligning your monitoring goals with your overall business objectives.

For example, if your goal is to increase subscribers for your SaaS, increase brand awareness and engagement high on your priority list. Or use your monitoring data to develop better buyer conversion strategies to increase your profit margins.

Key Metrics to Track on Instagram

The following metrics are typical key performance indicators (KPIs) that social media managers track to check how effectively they’ve leveraged their Instagram monitoring insights.

How to Track Engagement on Instagram: Likes, Comments, Shares

You can find out how many likes, comments, and shares your posts generate by accessing the Insights dashboard on your Meta Business profile. This area of Meta Business shows engagement metrics within the specified time frame and provides a holistic overview.

With this type of data, you can identify which posts are performing well and develop strategies to replicate the content that your audience enjoys the most.

Follower growth

The Audience tab in the Insights dashboard allows you to check your follower growth rate and note how it’s changed over time.

If you see a steady decrease or a plateau, that’s a good sign you need to shift your brand strategy and check your Instagram monitoring tools for fresh data.

How to Check Instagram Profile Interactions

Instagram Insights also has a Results tab where you can check your profile interactions, which is the number of people who tap on your profile.

Tracking this metric lets you see the volume of users funneling into your content, products, and external links. From there, you’ll know whether you need to improve your content to attract more users and create a more attractive profile to generate conversions.

Instagram Story Tracker: Tracking views, interactions, and conversions

The Instagram Story Tracker is accessible on the Insights dashboard under the Content tab. Here, you can track views, interactions, and conversions and see how many people view your Stories.

This metric serves all three of the primary objectives of Instagram monitoring.

Brand mentions and hashtags

You can’t view them via Instagram Insights, but brand mentions and hashtags are still critical metrics for gauging how successfully you’ve raised your brand awareness.

To access this type of data, you’ll need a monitoring tool like Mention, Sprout Social, Hootsuite, or Iconosquare. We’ll dive into those platforms in the next section.

Sentiment analysis and Instagram social listening

Whereas brand mentions and hashtags tell you whether or not Instagram users are hearing about your business, sentiment analysis and social listening tell you the emotions your audiences feel about your business.

Emotional marketing builds trust, satisfaction, and long-lasting relationships between brands and their target consumers. To know if your brand strategy is achieving that impact, you need to direct your data analysis to the right sources available through the best Instagram monitoring tools.

Best Instagram Monitoring Tools in 2025

These are the best Instagram monitoring tools in 2025 and can service all your analytics needs, from engagement tracking to social listening.

Mention

Mention is a premier social listening platform that can pull over 2 years’ worth of real-time data to provide insights about your Instagram brand, such as:

• Brand and keyword mentions
• Influence and sentiment
• Influencer marketing impact
• Content reach and search volume
• Trending topics in your market

They also provide content creation assistance (including AI tools), a publishing dashboard, and collaborative features like an approval workflow.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management platform that includes tools for social listening and competitive analysis, providing insights into competitors’ performance, audience sentiment, and trending content. For the former, they offer:

• AI-powered customer and competitor insights reaped from vast amounts of data
• Alerts of major changes in customer sentiment or brand mention volume
• Specialized monitoring features like Crisis Management, Consumer Research, and Brand Health

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a comprehensive suite of tools that lets you manage your Instagram account from one place.

In addition to features like a post scheduler, engagement trackers, and content creation aids, this program uses AI to enhance social listening. Their social listening tool accomplishes the following:

• Analyzes data and conversations on social media and creates summaries
• Offers brand mentions, trending topics, and other data from the past 7 days
• Performs AI-powered audience sentiment analysis

Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a social media management and marketing tool. It helps users create and organize Instagram content, as well as allows them to:

• Track Instagram performance
• Monitor competitors in your niche
• Identify trends in your industry

How to Monitor Instagram Accounts Using Different Tools

Digital marketers often don’t use just one tool to monitor their Instagram accounts. Different platforms pull data from different sources, so having a healthy mix is good.

To save money, consider using one paid monitoring tool (like Mention) and alternate between free ones (like Instagram’s built-in Insights dashboard).

Pros and cons of free vs. paid monitoring tools

Pros

• They’re easier on your budget
• They provide useful insights like engagement counts, profile interactions, and follower growth rates

Cons

• They don’t typically offer brand or hashtag mentions, access to big data, social listening, competitor or market analyses, or automatically generated reports

Features to Look for in Instagram Monitoring Tools

To maximize the benefits of Instagram monitoring, look for these key features in the tools you consider adding to your digital marketing toolkit.

Real-time data tracking

The data tracked by the Instagram tracker must be real-time, meaning it is current. This is essential for helping you:

• Stay ahead of trends.
• Respond to customer problems.
• Maintain your reputation in crises.

Monitor other Instagram accounts

Social monitoring platforms like the ones we referenced in the previous section offer a feature to monitor both your competitors and your own accounts.

The benefit of monitoring your competitors is you can:

• Discover trends in your industry that other brands are already posting.
• Find out what their audience likes and pivot your content and/or brand strategy to keep up.
• Identify gaps in their strategy and how to fill them to attract more followers.

Reporting and analytics

Analytics finds patterns in data, whereas reporting gathers them and presents them in a way humans can comprehend.

This is a must-have for a social monitoring tool, which ingests so much raw data that it would take you days, weeks, or even months to interpret it all.

Instagram Activity Tracker: Tracking user behavior and profile activities

What links are your Instagram followers clicking on? What type of engagement are they leaving on your posts, and which posts do they engage with the most?

Those are questions that only an Instagram activity tracker can answer. The answers themselves will tell you what your target audience is interested in (or not) and help you develop strategies to improve the quality of your profile activities (i.e., increase followers, sales conversions, etc.).

Sentiment analysis and brand health tracking

Above all other features, Instagram monitoring tools offer the highest value if they provide sentiment analysis and brand health tracking. These features use AI to take in social media conversations about your brand and track how people feel and what they say about you.

With this information, you can pivot your brand strategy to achieve all your most important goals, including increasing customer satisfaction, improving your reputation, and expanding into more targeted markets.

How to Set Up an Effective Instagram Monitoring Strategy

After you select your go-to Instagram monitoring tools, use the following guide to develop an effective strategy for utilizing them.

Identifying Your Target Audience

Identify who your most desirable customers are and develop a target audience. Answer these questions to get you started:

• Who or what businesses need or benefit from the goods or services you’re selling?
• What are their primary demographics, including age, gender, and income level?
• What are their pain points (i.e., problems they experience that your brand can help solve)?

Monitoring Brand Mentions and Hashtags

Set up keywords for your monitoring tool to look for in public Instagram posts and comments. Include specific words – such as your Instagram username, your brand name, and its acronym – as well as hashtags that other creators and businesses in your industry are using to get the broadest overview.

Tracking Competitors on Instagram

Add your top Instagram competitors to your monitoring tool. If you’re unsure who your competitors are, here are some tips for identifying them.

• Add Instagram accounts in your content or brand niche that have approximately the same number of followers as you.
• Add Instagram accounts with similar followings that offer the same goods, services, and/or types of content that you do.

Monitoring Influencer and User-Generated Content (UGC)

Find influencers and user-generated content (UGC) creators in your niche and monitor them for emerging trends, potential new competitors, and real-time indicators of the content and products your target audience enjoys.

Leveraging Instagram Analytics

Once your monitoring tool starts generating Instagram analytics reports, here’s how to leverage them to achieve your goals.

Using Sentiment Analysis to Improve Your Brand’s Image

Gauge how your target audience perceives your brand and use their sentiments to improve the face you present to the public.

For example, if your sentiment analysis reports show that your target audience doesn’t find your brand personable or engaging, build a content strategy that establishes how human, relatable, and fun your brand is.

Leveraging Audience Feedback for Product Development

Use audience feedback from your monitoring tools about your product or other goods in your niche market to enhance your brand’s product development.

For example, if you sell athleticwear for women and notice your target audience is posting on Instagram about wanting more pockets in their leggings, use that as your cue to work more pockets into your future designs.

Adjusting Your Strategy Based on Monitoring Results

The great thing about Instagram monitoring tools is that you can adjust your monitoring strategy to refine your results. The more you experiment with the tool and the data you ask it to analyze, the better you’ll become at extracting the right information to help you achieve all your brand goals.

Once you start leveraging Instagram analytics to drive traffic to your website, it’s important to consider how that traffic contributes to your overall business goals to create an effective Instagram strategy that supports growth.

For publishers, advanced monetization solutions that integrate with existing platforms can help maximize ad revenue from increased site visits.

Combining traffic insights from Instagram with a robust ad strategy ensures your efforts translate into meaningful results.

Staying Compliant with Instagram’s Policies

Instagram monitoring tools that access the platform’s API must comply with Meta’s Privacy Policy, which aims to protect users’ data. One of the requirements they must fulfill is having a privacy policy that explicitly states the following:

• What data do they collect
• How they collect and then use that information
• How users can request to delete that information

These rules also help monitoring tools follow all applicable laws and regulations regarding data collection and avoid potential lawsuits.

As a user of these tools, ensure they comply with Meta’s Privacy Policy to protect yourself from inadvertently accessing Instagram user data through illegal means.

Final Thoughts

If Instagram is the gateway to growing your brand and a loyal following, Instagram monitoring tools are the keys to opening it.

By obtaining sophisticated data reports driven by AI analysis, you can achieve multiple objectives for your brand. From raising brand awareness to increasing engagement and sales, the sky’s the limit.

Use free and paid Instagram monitoring tools to find data about your engagement, follower growth, profile interactions, Stories, brand mentions, hashtags, sentiment analysis, and brand image.

Build a comprehensive Instagram monitoring strategy that extracts the most important data to help you optimize your brand.

Leverage Instagram analytics to improve your brand image, develop products, and adjust your monitoring strategy so you can respond to public sentiment and grow your brand meaningfully.

Ensure your Instagram monitoring tool stays compliant with Instagram and Meta’s Privacy Policy so you can obtain the data you need to accomplish your brand goals legally.

Mention has the real-time monitoring, analytics, and engagement features you need to conquer Instagram. Try their services risk-free with a 14-day free trial or schedule a demo.