Luca Urlando Saw 20% Growth in Instagram Followers After Winning Only U.S. Men’s Gold Medal

The World Championships don’t offer the same opportunities for growth in fame for an athlete as the Olympic Games do – but that doesn’t mean there is no opportunity at all.

All but one member of the U.S. team (Emma Weyant) saw a net follower growth during the World Championships. Some of the breakout stars of the team saw the biggest growth. On the women’s side, that included Anna Peplowski, who is pretty active on social and had a really good leg on the American 800 free relay, saw the biggest growth. Claire Weinstein and first-time World Champion Katharine Berkoff also saw big follower growth, by percentage.

On the men’s side, the two American stars of the meet Luca Urlando and Jack Alexy were the breakouts on Instagram. Urlando, the only gold medalist for the American men, saw his following grow by more than 20%, while Alexy’s grew by almost 19% during the meet where he cemented himself as one of the world’s best sprinters – including a 45.9 to drag the men’s medley relay to bronze.

Notes & Caveats:

• N/A means that athletes either don’t have ‘creator’ accounts on Instagram, or have changed their accounts to ‘creator’ accounts relatively recently. Updates to Instagram’s API don’t allow the third-party tools we use to track these things to pull Instagram followers from accounts that aren’t the ‘creator’ or ‘business’ type. We’ll try and do a better job of capturing these counts before the next big meet to more accurately track growth.
• We used a timeline of July 15 through August 10 to capture the pre-World Championship period when there’s a lot of social posts flying around and interviews happening, plus the post-Worlds glow. For most of the athletes, the actual World Championship period was where most of the growth came from.
• While it’s hard to get a good count on the number of stories each athlete posted in the period, there is definitely a correlation between swimmers who posted more and those who didn’t. The women’s team was much more active on social and have much higher follower counts, and saw way more growth, than the men’s team.
• The women’s team (among swimmers we could track) grew by 55,327 followers, or 2.5%. The men’s team grew by 13,691, which is almost exactly the same percentage as the women’s team, but the men’s numbers would probably be impacted more significantly by the inclusion of the non-creator accounts.
• Michael Andrew (240,151) has almost as many followers as the rest of the men’s team combined (307,930). He is by far the most active member of the men’s team on social media, both at Worlds and in general.
• It is, generally, much harder to grow when your account is big, especially in the U.S. where there isn’t much penetration beyond the hardcore swim market. The Virginia swimmers Kate Douglass, Alex Walsh, and Gretchen Walsh, didn’t have the biggest growth by percentage, but growing 5-8% in a month when your account is in the six-figure range is huge.
• For athletes with multiple accounts, we used their current account or the one where most of their swimming content appears. A handful have second accounts for side projects. Campbell McKean is a really talented photographer, and you can check out his photo page here.

Women’s Team

Men’s Team