Top Growing Brands on Instagram in May 2014

Every month, TOTEMS provides a summary of how brands and companies evolved on Instagram. Here’s the report for May 2014:

This month’s top 20 comes with a few surprises:

• • NASA Skyrocketed to 4th place after ranking 13th last month
  • Triangl Swimwear makes a remarkable entrance in the top 20. At this pace, it could get to 1 million followers before the end of June!
  • Vogue Magazine climbs from 20th to 7th place month-to-month
  • The top 20 brands gained 202k Followers on average, a 16% month-on-month increase over a 174k average growth in April.

The Million Followers Club now has 52 Brand Members

Some key facts about the top brands on Instagram (see them in the Nitrogram 50):

• • • 52 brands have over 1 Million Followers (up from 48 last month)
    • 6 brands and companies have over 3 Million followers: National Geographic, The Ellen Show, Nike, Victoria’s Secret, Forever 21, 9GAG
    • First brand to pass 5 million Followers: National Geographic
    • Most hashtagged brands: #VSCOcam, #Nike, and #Disney

+3.6 million photos were added to #VSCOcam in the past month! A crazy growth when you know that #Nike is at the 2nd place with only +1.2 million photos (it’s still a lot).How did that happen?

VSCO Cam is a photo editing app that Instagrammers grew fond of. When they upload a photo edited via VSCO, they hashtag it #VSCOcam to let their followers know that they used the external app for editing.

With Instagram rolling out new creative tools, we’re interested to see how this trend will evolve. We’ll be sure to keep an eye on VSCO during our overview of brands on Instagram next month!

Top Performer in May: Plated Grows +300%

We told you to look out for Plated this month! The brand was selected as an Instagram featured user sometime in May. Needless to say: this gave a big boost to its following,making it grow 300%. The food company went from 12k followers to 47k in just a month … And we’re not talking inactive, ghost followers: these are true Instagram users who value following beautiful accounts!

This shows just how important it is for brands to share quality content and to follow Instagram’s advice. If you do it enough, maybe one day you’ll end up in the “suggested users” list as well…—This post was contributed by Thibaut Davoult. Thibaut is managing content and community around Nitrogram. If your brand or company is on Instagram, he’s probably following it already.