2024 Social Media Stats: Instagram
This is the seventh annual report on the social media statistics of leading kombucha brands.
At the end of 2018, we published an initial, informal survey of kombucha brands’ presence on social media. At the time, we reviewed the stats for the number of posts and followers, or likes, on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram of a small group of 140 brands.
The 2019 survey selected the top 20 from 1,400 brands listed at the time in the Booch News Worldwide Directory. In 2020, the survey covered over 1,700 brands. By the time of the 2021 survey, the number of kombucha brands worldwide has grown to over 2,000. By December 2022 we were tracking 2,629 brands. At the end of 2023, we tracked 2,688.
Now, for the first time, we have recorded a decline in absolute numbers of eight, a result of adding 67 and deleting 75 — those with no online presence whatsoever — over the year. We now track 2,680 brands, all but 170 of which have an Instagram account.
The most active social media platform in terms of posts and comments is, as always, Instagram.
There are a total of 2,510 brands with an Instagram account — 93% of all kombucha companies worldwide. However, of these, 1,285 have not posted an update in the past year — there’s a good chance they are no longer in business, but some might just be too busy brewing ‘booch to mess with social media! The Worldwide Directory is an archival list, and many companies might have closed but still have a social media footprint. In this case, we continue to list them.
Only 815 companies posted an update to Instagram in Q4 2024.
Posts
The number of posts by account clearly shows the vast majority of brands (64%) have shared fewer than 250 posts. At the other end of the scale, only 16 brands have more than 3,000 posts (including non-pure-play brands such as Sierra Nevada). With this post, Booch News now joins the select 480 brands worldwide who have added more than 500 posts to their Instagram!
It’s safe to assume that leading brands employ teams of social media managers to update Instagram. And they’ve been very busy in 2023. This table shows the change for the brands with the most posts.
Some brands posted an average of one update a day. Some post twice a day. Look at their feeds, and you’ll see these are not just casual shots of a bottle of ‘booch on the beach. They employ art directors, photographers, and writers who keep their tens of thousands of followers informed and entertained.
Again, FWIW, there are now 828,984 posts in the accounts we list, with 42,300 added over the year, or 116 new pictures a day!
2024 Leader Board
Here are the leading ‘pure-play’ kombucha brands ranked by the number of followers. We’ve left out companies such as Suja Organic, Flax & Kale, and Rude Health, who make many other products besides ‘booch that attract Instagram followers. We also omit brewers such as Sierra Nevada, who make hard kombucha but primarily sell beer.
The right column shows the ranking from a year ago.
In terms of the number of followers, GTs is the perennial leader, as you’d expect from the brand that created the category.
Over half are located outside the USA. There are four brands from Brazil, two from Spain, as well as brands from Australia, Colombia, Canada, Portugal, and Chile.
Only six percent of brands have more than 10,000 followers. In fact, only 15% have more than 5,000. The majority (40%) have between 1,000 and 5,000–as is the case for my Booch News Instagram with 3,757.
The Booch News Worldwide Directory lists all brands, with links to their websites and social media sites.
Year-over-Year
Comparing the 2023 numbers to today’s shows several trends.
This table highlights the percent increase (or decrease) in the number of followers of the Top 20 leaders.
There is no strict correlation between the number of posts and the number of Followers added. Remedy and Health-Ade posted over 200 times, yet only added a couple of thousand new people.
The exceptions shown are
- Kombucha Bewow: It seems doubtful that their additional 47,000+ Followers were a result of organic growth.
- Cove Kombucha and Flying Embers: : According to my data, the total number of Posts fell from 866 to 87 and 789 to 58, respectively. They rebranded and rebooted their Instagram accounts, removing the older pictures without losing Followers.
Social media slowdown?
Putting aside Kombucha Bewow, Cove Kombucha is the clear winner in absolute number of new followers, adding over 24,000 in 2024. Last year, Juneshine led with over 35,000 new followers, of which 1,200 were purged in 2024. However, these are a shadow of previous records of 74,800 followers that Humm added in 2020 and the 71,781 added by Komvida in 2021. As the market leader, GT’s added over 20,000 followers annually for 2020-2022. However, back in 2019, they added 68,000 new people. This year, the number sank to a mere 9,914 new Followers.
This plateauing in the growth of new followers is typical of industry leaders. While it might not be significant in terms of sales (which we cannot know since no brands report unit volume), it might be due to a shifting demographic and indicate more mainstream acceptance of kombucha. Perhaps the number of brand evangelists drinking ‘booch who could become fans on social media is a finite universe. People who buy the drink, as a matter of course, might not follow a brand any more than they would other staples.
On the other hand…
What’s true of the global leaders above is not, however, true of the vast majority of brands worldwide. In 2023, the brands in the Worldwide Directory added just over 2.5 million followers. In 2024, this dropped dramatically, with only 850,000 new followers added, for a total of 10,598,221 followers worldwide.
Regionally, North America leads with 3.8 million Followers, Europe has 2.5 million, and Latin America has 2.4 million. This, of course, might reflect the relative popularity of the social media platform in different countries, as much as the number of ‘booch fans!
It’s interesting to see that eight brands experienced a decrease in the number of followers in 2024. This might be due to the proactive pruning of ‘fake followers’ — there are several free tools that give insight into Instagram audience quality. This article recommends steps brands should take to remove suspicious followers.
Disclaimer
The content of this article is accurate to the best of our knowledge and is presented for general informational purposes only. Data is current as of Dec 20, 2024, and was sourced from the Booch News Instagram Analysis and Worldwide Directory. The opinions are those of the editor. Please send corrections or questions to ian@boochnews.com. Comments are welcome.
