Best Brands on Instagram Lego Califia Farms FollowMeTo Lorna Jane Letterfolk Apartment Therapy Paris Opera Ballet Tentsile Desenio No Your City Vans Divinity LA Bracelets WeWork Finfolk Productions Shiseido Sephora Collections Staples (Psst -- Want to get a stunning Instagram Story auto-magically created for your brand? Many of the comments included exclamations of how beautiful and inspiring the setup is and how it's the commenters' "dream bedroom." Followers: 283k WeWork provides shared office spaces in cities and countries all over the globe -- so it only makes sense that they should post a lot of photos showcasing their beautiful co-working communities. Finfolk Productions' Instagram feed is full of beautifully shot photos that play into the mermaid fantasy by looking more like mythical art than real people. Why it's engaging: Back in late March 2016, Instagram started rolling out the ability to upload 60-second videos -- and we've seen some amazing Instagram videos from brands ever since, like the one above from Shiseido. You can post highly engaging videos on Instagram without a huge video team or a bottomless budget. This branded Sephora account also diversifies its feed with a lot of fun Instagram video content that gives off the same playful vibes. Followers: 55.2k The folks at Staples do a lot of things right when it comes to Instagram content, but there are two that particularly grab our attention -- engaging with followers by asking questions and including calls-to-action in captions, and staying true to the brand's playful-yet-practical personality. When it comes to engaging Staples' followers, it's all about asking questions in the photo captions. For example, check out the second photo below featuring a series of emojis -- its caption reads, "That's pretty much our day.
Contrary to what your friends’ photos suggest, Instagram isn’t just a social network for selfies and brunch pics. In fact, Instagram has a whopping 700 million active monthly users as of September 2017 — the last 100 million of which joined in the prior five months.
In a world where visual content remains a crucial part of any business’ marketing strategy, Instagram marketing presents a unique opportunity to visually represent your brand, celebrate its personality, and keep it top-of-mind for all those users who scroll through their Instagram feeds every single day.
Although they’re few and far between, there are some brands out there — in every industry, and with every type of target customer — who are doing really, really well on Instagram.
Ready to get inspired? Check out this list of brands that are thriving on Instagram right now, and what about their posts sets them apart. For each of these brands, we’ve included examples of their best posts. For some of them, we’ve also included their most popular Instagram post of all time in terms of engagement (i.e. combined total of likes and comments) thanks to data from Instagram analytics and management platform Iconosquare.
Best Brands on Instagram
- Lego
- Califia Farms
- FollowMeTo
- Lorna Jane
- Letterfolk
- Apartment Therapy
- Paris Opera Ballet
- Tentsile
- Desenio
- No Your City
- Vans
- Divinity LA Bracelets
- WeWork
- Finfolk Productions
- Shiseido
- Sephora Collections
- Staples
(Psst — Want to get a stunning Instagram Story auto-magically created for your brand? Check out StoriesAds.com, a free Story generator from HubSpot and Shakr. Click here to get started.)
17 of the Best Brands on Instagram
Followers: 2.6M
If you’re not following Lego on Instagram, you’re missing out on some entertaining content that isn’t just product plugs for kids.
The famous plastic building block brand populates its Instagram feed with fun takes on pop culture references everyone is bound to appreciate — something many businesses can learn from on their own Instagram accounts.
While most of Lego’s posts do serve to announce the release of new Lego characters, the main value in its Instagram account is to emulate familiar social tropes in a classic Lego way. Some of them are pretty impressive, like the life-sized princess carriage below, celebrating the recent Royal Wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
Of course Lego doubled down on the Royal Wedding craze with a Lego-style animation of the bride and groom, below …
Followers: 100k
Califia Farms natural beverage products have some of the most attractive packaging we’ve come across. In fact, it’s so iconic that it won top honors in the global packaging design category from Beverage World Magazine.
Instagram is a perfect platform to showcase that cool, curvy bottle, and the folks at Califia don’t shy away from doing just that — most of the brand’s posts feature the beverage’s containers in some way, whether they’re the main subject of the photo, or more of an accessory in the context of the active, healthy lifestyle Califia’s buyer personas love.
Something Califia does really well on Instagram is create fun, playful videos and GIFs. Check out this one, which they used to teach viewers how to create a veggie-based penne pasta:
A post shared by Califia Farms (@califiafarms) on May 22, 2018 at 10:42am PDT
And this one, which is just plain fun to watch:
A post shared by Califia Farms (@califiafarms) on May 23, 2018 at 9:19am PDT
Followers: 515k
Ever seen those photos of a woman leading a man by the hand in all different parts of the world? That pose was made famous by a couple named Murad and Natalia Osmann for their #FollowMeTo project.
Their Instagram account is a mix of stunning images of the classic #FollowMeTo pose that have been edited beautifully, as well as some really interesting behind-the-scenes photos of their world travels — including some fun photos of the “making of” the famous pose.
Followers: 813k
If your brand were a person, how would you describe its personality? Australian activewear company Lorna Jane has done an awesome job answering this important branding question with its Instagram content. Spend just a few seconds scrolling through these photos, and you’ll quickly be able to name the target Lorna Jane buyer: a young, sporty, twenty- or thirty-something woman who values looking good while maintaining an active lifestyle.
The images posted by Lorna Jane, which often show the brand’s clothing and accessories, as well as images of women who embody its target buyer persona, are colorful, playful, and inspirational, which is a perfect representation of the brand’s essence — in other words, its heart, soul, and spirit.
Followers: 289k
Letterfolk is a small business run by a husband-and-wife team who create and sell beautiful, handcrafted felt letterboards. Each letterboard comes with a full set of characters so people can personalize the walls of their homes, which means endless room for creativity.
Instagram is the perfect platform for them to inspire customers and aspiring customers with real customers’ boards, as well as ideas they’ve come up with and staged themselves. Their Instagram content is funny, thought-provoking, and relatable — all recipes for shareability.
Why it’s engaging: Not only is this photo showing a funny and clever message, but it’s also very, very relatable for parents of young children — a very large audience and also one of Letterfolk’s target customers. It’s also a very taggable photo, so the comment section is rife with Instagram users mentioning their friends’ usernames so they can share in the fun.
Followers: 1.5M
Apartment Therapy’s Instagram account really is a source of therapy, if you love the sight of cozy homes. If you’ve seen social media posts from Apartment Therapy before, rest assured the pictures of residences on its Instagram account are just as creative.
Two recent posts to Apartment Therapy’s Instagram feed are below. From the plant-friendly living room on the left, to the comfortable A-frame on the right, this brand gives its Instagram followers plenty of inspiration to personalize their own space and, according to its Instagram bio, “live happy, healthy lives at home.”
Followers: 262k
The city of Paris is known for many lovely things — wine, cheese, and art are just a few. But that last one, art, is photographically captured on the Instagram account of the Paris Opera Ballet, or Ballet de l’Opera de Paris.
The account captures candid images of the ballet’s dancers during performances, rehearsals, and backstage, giving viewers an artful glimpse at what goes into the ballet’s productions. It also makes use of something called banners on Instagram, when larger photos can be divided into multiple pictures to create a tiled banner of smaller photos. (There are several apps available to pull that off, but to start, check out Tile Pic).
The way this account highlights performance venues is noteworthy, too. The third photo beneath the first two below provides an intimate shot of rehearsal, conveying a gritty behind-the-scenes feel that can generate excitement for productions.
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