How Gymshark grew engagement by 30% on Instagram with Iconosquare

About Gymshark

Gymshark is a UK-based fitness apparel and accessories brand, headquartered in Solihull, England. With over 13 million followers only on Instagram (across its three accounts), Gymshark has grown from a garage start-up into one of the world's most influential athleisure brands.

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Its social team operates with one constant ambition: double follower growth every financial year, without sacrificing engagement.

The context and challenges: Growing fast without losing engagement

Most brands face a predictable tradeoff: as follower count climbs, engagement rates drop. New audiences are less invested, content has to please more people, and the algorithm dilutes reach.

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‍Gymshark's social team set out to do the opposite: keep engagement metrics rising even as the audience doubled.

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The challenge was bigger than just publishing better content. The team had to:

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• Manage three Instagram accounts in parallel, each with its own audience and editorial cadence: campaigns, event coverage, product launches.
• Scale UGC and influencer marketing as a core engagement driver. With a wide network of creators, ambassadors, and customers contributing to the Gymshark story, the team needed a way to monitor and react to that activity without losing visibility.
• Coordinate across a 10-person team. Social media at Gymshark isn't a single role, it's a function spanning content planning, scheduling, analytics, and community management. Multiple people needed access to the same data, at the same time, without bottlenecks.
• Avoid SaaS sprawl. With many marketing tools already in the stack, the team wanted one platform doing the most, not five doing fragments.

The solution: An all-in-one platform built around engagement analytics

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Gymshark needed a tool with the depth of dedicated analytics software and the breadth of an end-to-end social media management platform for fitness apparel brands.

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After evaluating options, Iconosquare ticked every box:

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• Analytics: Deep engagement analytics that informed strategy without overwhelming the team. Detailed enough to answer "why did this post outperform?", readable enough to share across the business.
• Scheduling: Plan, schedule, and publish content across the three Instagram accounts in advance. Rebecca says she "lives in the scheduler."
• Reporting: Recurring reports the team can set up once and share company-wide, with no manual data extraction.
• Conversations: Reply to engagement in real time from a single inbox, critical for hitting Gymshark's ambitious engagement targets.
• Listening: Easy monitoring of UGC and influencer performance, so the team can spot the content worth amplifying.
• Collaboration: Multi-user access across a 10-person team spanning content, planning, and analytics.

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One platform. One source of truth. The whole social function aligned around it.

The results and transformation: Engagement up, while audience doubled

Within weeks of switching to Iconosquare, the team was already seeing momentum. After 1.5+ years on the platform, the results compound.

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A per post engagement rate increase of 30%

+30% per-post engagement rate increase. The headline outcome, achieved against the prevailing trend of engagement decay at scale.

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Follower growth of over 50%

+50% follower growth without engagement softening as the audience grew.

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  Doubled average likes and comments per post, proof that new followers are as invested as the original community.

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Beyond the metrics, the operational impact has been substantial:

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• Reporting time collapsed. Recurring reports replaced manual data extractions, freeing the team to spend their hours on content and strategy.
• The 10-person team works in parallel, not in queue. Multiple users access what they need simultaneously. No more bottlenecks at the analytics layer!
• UGC and influencer activity stay visible. With Listening built into the workflow, the team consistently surfaces the right community content to repost, keeping followers engaged long after the initial campaign push.

"The ongoing increase of our engagement through the analytics and insights has been fundamental to the approach of our activity. The feed allows me to keep track of our influencers and user-generated content, which we always keep an eye on and re-post from time to time to keep our followers engaged." Rebecca Shipton — Social Media Executive, Gymshark

What's next?

Gymshark continues to push the bar each financial year — doubling follower growth, lifting engagement, and tightening the loop between social activity and brand performance. With Iconosquare at the core of the workflow, the team has the tooling to keep pace with its own ambition.

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For social media leads working at this scale, Rebecca's view is simple: the right all-in-one platform doesn't just save time — it shapes what the team can credibly aim for next.