Influencer Spotlight: Kayla Itsines

Earlier this week, Forbes leveraged Captiv8 data to profile some of the world’s top influencers across a range of categories including fitness, beauty and home. If you’re interested in fitness and checked out the list of top social A-listers, you might have recognized the Australian at the top of the list: Kayla Itsines. This exercise guru from “Down Under” has managed to build a sizable social audience, with more than 18.8m followers across the major social networks. Some reports suggest her “Sweat with Kayla” app may have even earned a cool $17m in revenue alone in 2016. What’s the story behind this fitness-focused social media powerhouse? And what do her social stats tell us about her popularity?

As Kayla has told a number of media sources, her burgeoning fitness career first took off when she was tasked with running a local gym in her hometown of Adelaide, Australia. During her job stint at the gym, she started developing a personal fitness routine to tone her arms, abs and legs, and once she saw it was working, sharing that routine with friends. Over the past few years she’s methodically grown her audience, constructing a fitness-focused social media empire that now spans YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, a mobile app, and more.

Here’s an example of the types of fitness-themed posts Kayla typically shares to Instagram:

Classic !! This was at my goddaughters sports day! How cool is this ?? I totally had to !! www.kaylaitsines.com/app

A post shared by Kayla Itsines (@kayla_itsines) on Apr 10, 2017 at 7:40pm PDT

What are some of the engagement stats behind this massive social media (and money-making) powerhouse? We took a closer look at Captiv8’s insights platform to investigate.

Here are two of the more interesting findings:

• Instagram is Kayla’s top social media account for engagement: nearly 85% of Kayla’s total 7.6m social engagements in the past month were on Instagram, with an average of 42k engagements for each piece of content
• Kayla has a devoted following among females between 25 and 34: Kayla’s audience strongly skews female, with more than 87% of her followers were female, and more than 40% of those female followers between the ages of 25 and 34. That’s good news for marketers, who often try to target this high-spending group due to their discretionary income.

When it comes to fitness advice, there seems to be no limit for this Australian icon of social media wellness. Who are the biggest social media names for your own brand’s chosen industry? Do you know? Let Captiv8 use its in-depth suite of influencer analytics tools to find out for yourself.