How to Monitor Instagram Hashtags and Brand Mentions

To monitor Instagram hashtags and brand mentions, run the same collection on a schedule, such as daily: your campaign hashtags, your brand name as a keyword, and your account’s tagged-posts page, which lists posts that tag you. Store each post’s ID so you only act on new ones, and alert your team when volume or engagement jumps. apidojo’s Instagram actors on Apify cover all three inputs without an Instagram login.

The official Instagram API’s Hashtag Search allows 30 unique hashtags per account in a rolling 7-day period, which rules it out for broad monitoring (Meta for Developers). This hub covers the setup, alerts and costs, and links to the use cases built on it. Finding hashtags in the first place is covered in how to find trending hashtags on Instagram.

What Should You Monitor on Instagram?

Monitor 3 sources: hashtags, keywords and tagged posts, because each catches mentions the others miss. The table maps them to inputs of apidojo’s Instagram Scraper API (Apify).

Source	What it catches	Input
Hashtags	Campaign and community posts	https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/yourtag/
Keyword search	Posts mentioning your brand without a tag	keywords: ["your brand"]
Tagged posts	Posts that tag your account	https://www.instagram.com/yourbrand/tagged/

Keyword search results can come back with limited captions and counts, because Instagram’s search results leave them out, so treat keywords as a discovery feed.

How Do You Build an Instagram Monitor in Python?

Collect new posts for each source, skip IDs you’ve already seen, and record daily counts. The until input keeps only posts created on or after a date (Apify).

import json, os, pathlib, datetime as dt
from apify_client import ApifyClient

SOURCES = [
    "https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/yourcampaign/",
    "https://www.instagram.com/yourbrand/tagged/",
]
state_file = pathlib.Path("ig_monitor.json")
state = json.loads(state_file.read_text()) if state_file.exists() else {"seen": [], "daily": {}}
since = (dt.date.today() - dt.timedelta(days=2)).isoformat()

client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])
run = client.actor("apidojo/instagram-scraper-api").call(run_input={
    "startUrls": SOURCES,
    "keywords": ["your brand"],
    "until": since,
    "maxItems": 600,
})

new = [p for p in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items() if p["id"] not in state["seen"]]
state["seen"] = (state["seen"] + [p["id"] for p in new])[-10000:]
state["daily"][dt.date.today().isoformat()] = len(new)
state_file.write_text(json.dumps(state))

for p in sorted(new, key=lambda p: p.get("likeCount") or 0, reverse=True)[:10]:
    print(p["owner"]["username"], p.get("likeCount"), p["url"])

The two-day window overlaps the previous run, so nothing slips through; the seen list removes duplicates. Run it daily with cron or an Apify schedule. Avoid a very near until date, which makes runs inefficient (Apify). The same pattern on other platforms is monitoring TikTok trends with an API and monitoring a keyword on X.

When Should a Monitor Alert You?

Alert on spikes, not on every post. Listed below are the 3 signals worth a message to your team.

1. Volume spike: today’s new posts are well above the median of the last 7 days.
2. High-reach mention: a post from an account with a large following, or with unusually high likes.
3. Negative conversation: complaints in captions or comments; see how to analyse Instagram comment sentiment.

What Does Monitoring Instagram Cost?

On apidojo’s Instagram Scraper API, each hashtag query costs $0.015 with 30 posts included, each user query, including a tagged-posts page, $0.005 with 10 included, each keyword search $0.015 with 20 included, and each extra post $0.0005 (Apify). A daily check of 1 hashtag, 1 tagged page and 1 keyword that stays within the included posts costs $0.035 a day, about $1.05 over 30 days.

Setup, daily	Cost per day	Over 30 days
1 hashtag, 1 tagged page, 1 keyword, within included posts	$0.035	About $1.05
10 hashtags, 30 posts each	$0.15	About $4.50
10 hashtags, 130 posts each	$0.65	About $19.50

What Can You Build on an Instagram Monitor?

The same collect, store and compare loop powers the other use cases in this series. Listed below are the guides.

• How to track competitors on Instagram
• How to vet Instagram influencers with data
• How to analyse Instagram comment sentiment