Case studies
How brands built their creator programs, with public numbers we pulled through the API.
10 brands on TikTok and Instagram, compared: what actually drives viewsMedian views, engagement, posting rate and hashtag size for Gymshark, e.l.f., Duolingo, CeraVe, Ryanair, Alo, Chipotle, Scrub Daddy, Liquid Death and Rare Beauty, pulled on the same day.What goes viral on X: we reverse-engineered 414 top postsWe pulled X's top posts for 8 topics from the last 14 days and compared the top quarter with the bottom half. Bookmarks, topic and timing matter. Threads, lists and ALL CAPS hooks do not.Gymshark: how a creator network built a 27 billion view hashtagGymshark grew from free gear sent to bodybuilders in 2012 to £646m in revenue. Its TikTok today: 6.7M followers, 10.8% median engagement, and creators in 59% of captions.e.l.f. Cosmetics and #eyeslipsface: the TikTok challenge, seven years latere.l.f.'s 2019 #eyeslipsface challenge was reported at 1B, then 5B, then 7B views. Today the hashtag shows 12.8B views and 3.8M videos. What the brand does on TikTok now.Duolingo on TikTok: from 1.9M to 18.5M followers with an owlDuolingo's mascot account grew from 1.9M TikTok followers in 2021 to 18.5M. Median views of 878K and 11.6% engagement, the highest of the 10 brands we compared.CeraVe: how dermatologists and skinfluencers grew #cerave to 33 billion viewsIn 2020 #cerave had 303M TikTok views. Today it has 33.4B, the biggest brand hashtag of the 10 we compared, from an account with 2.1M followers.Ryanair on TikTok: 6-second jokes and the best reach per follower we measuredRyanair's self-deprecating TikTok has 2.9M followers and the best views-to-followers ratio of 10 brands we compared. Median video length: 6 seconds.Alo: a celebrity and creator strategy that lives on InstagramAlo has 6.0M Instagram followers and 1.0M on TikTok. Its posts tag Jake Shane, Bella Hadid, Peggy Gou and Jisoo. How the activewear brand uses famous faces.Chipotle: #GuacDance, Creator Class, and what the numbers look like nowChipotle's 2019 #GuacDance drew 250K submissions in six days. Today the tag has 147K videos and 1.1B views, and #chipotle has 26.4B. How the brand works with creators.Scrub Daddy on TikTok: 4.4M followers from 165 postsThe Shark Tank sponge brand has 4.4M TikTok followers and 104M likes from just 165 posts, more than 630K likes per post. How a cleaning product became TikTok content.Liquid Death: entertainment-first social, and a quiet TikTokLiquid Death has 7.3M TikTok and 6.8M Instagram followers, but posted 7 TikToks in the last 90 days and its hashtag is under 1B views. What that says about brand-made content.Rare Beauty: a founder, creators, and 23.6 billion hashtag viewsRare Beauty grew from 1.2M TikTok followers in 2023 to 5.2M. It posts more than once a day, gets 9.9% median engagement, and #rarebeauty has 23.6B views.