New research into Instagram influencers in the USA has been published by trendHERO (an advanced influencer-marketing platform).
The analysis is based on audience growth for Instagram profiles in 2021, i.e., how much influencers’ overall follower quantities changed from January to December in that year. We also excluded low-quality accounts by using our Account Quality Score algorithm. Thus, the largest audience increase was a rise of 74 million followers.
- The top five influencers were as follows:
- Khloé Kardashian (@khloekardashian) — 139.6m + 74m followers
- Ariana Grande (@arianagrande) — 228.1m + 62.9m followers
- Jennifer Lopez (@jlo) — 147m + 45.6m followers
- Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) — 152.8m + 44.5m followers
- Kourtney Kardashian (@kourtneykardash) — 115.4m + 44.4m followers
In line with the aims of this research, 200 influencers with an audience growth of 2m or more were analyzed. In terms of the occupations of opinion leaders, the following distribution was found:
- Singers – 33.07%
- Brands – 15.75%
- Actors – 13.39%
- Sports-related – 7.09%
- Business – 7.09%
- Tiktokers – 6.30%
- Celebrities – 5.51%
- Other – 11.81%
There is a notable absence of Instagram-content creators in this list. We understand why Jennifer Lopez and Ariana Grande have such a striking quantity of followers. But why are there no travel or food influencers? There are two main reasons:
- Celebrities gain a general audience. Niche content creators need followers based on their broad or narrow interests. In this meaning mere numbers of followers are not synonymous with a loyal audience. It is better to gain 1,000 active, engaged followers in a certain niche than 10,000 subscribers who do not really appreciate your content.
- Celebrity promotion plays a key role. Celebrities try to convert popularity into followers and vice versa. Thus, they can afford large budgets for promotions, including social-media campaigns.
The research also contains infographics concerning top actors, singers and brands, as defined by follower growth in 2021. Learn more about top influencers from the USA by follower growth.
trendHERO is an advanced influencer-marketing tool for Instagram.
Its core features are influencer discovery (a database with 90m+ accounts) and analytics (comprising fake-follower detection and audience-interest checks). There are many other features to help you increase the revenue from your campaigns, such as outreach, similar-influencer searches, tracking, ad posts, and overlaps.