With over a billion users worldwide and over 100 million U.S. users alone, Instagram is by far pacing ahead as one of the favorite platforms for brands. Given the visual nature of our industry, it makes perfect sense that Instagram (paired with Facebook) was the most popular marketing channel reported by readers in our latest marketing survey.
In order to learn from the best, it's important to identify the best. We looked at 100 spirit and beer Instagram accounts to rank where they placed. Collectively, the top 100 accounts we tracked had over 8.3M followers combined when we gathered this data back near the end of October. In the table below, we indicate if the follower count was from a brand's main account or from their U.S.-focused account.
The top accounts by followers might not be all that surprising given their recognition. For instance, Jack Daniel's, which has one of the strongest brands in the world, period, is by far the biggest liquor account by nearly 75K followers over Grey Goose. The key is to look for smaller brands with a much larger footprint and try to discover how they're able to stand out and beat brands with more established histories, budgets, and resources. Brands like WhistlePig, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Monkey 47 have found ways to uniquely tell their stories and have attracted massive audiences wanting to see more.
Let us know who we're missing as we'll continue to update this list from time to time.