Last month we launched a new series focused on highlighting the top posts and publishers from across different platforms. This series focuses on a control group of 50 publishers so as to see the impacts of seasonal trends across a consistent group.
In February, sports and entertainment dominated on Instagram, and that trend continued into March, though it was disrupted to an extent by a wider group of publishers.
Here are some of the key takeaways for this month:
- LADbible broke Vogue’s hold on the top three posts with some cute dog content
- Between them, ESPN and Bleacher Report had more than 600 of the top 1,000 posts
- Interactions with this group of 50 publishers on Instagram topped 313 million in March
Let’s get into the details.
What publishers performed best on Instagram in March 2025?
We changed the way we put this graph together slightly compared to last month, but this approach will be the way we do it going forwards for better overall benchmarking.
Previously, we took the top 1,000 posts and calculated the engagement by publisher for them, but this has the disadvantage of over-indexing on the top performers.
For example, Bleacher Report and ESPN had more than 680 of the top 1,000 posts in February, so it logically follows that they would get outsized engagement doing the calculation this way. But it also means you might miss a publisher that posts frequently and gets mid-level engagement on every post but has few that cracked the top 1,000.
For this month, and going forward, we took the total engagement across all posts by each publisher, which should give a fuller picture of which publishers are getting engagement on the platform.
Top publishers on Instagram in March 2025 by engagement (50-publisher sample)
Even with all of those caveats, Bleacher Report and ESPN still comfortably came out on top, with more than 60 million engagements each, while Vogue maintained third spot with 20 million.
Interestingly, this is less engagement for each of them when measuring all their March posts in the aggregate than their top posts alone received in February. This resulted in a tightening of the field among this group, with the top ten much closer than they had been in February.
And it’s in the rest of the top ten that we see the difference this new approach makes, with the rest of the top ten having aggregate engagement of at least 9 million each, and Fox News and LADbible closing the gap on the power publishers at the top of the list. This success was driven by very different types of content, with LADbible’s viral, cute, and interesting moments contrasting with Fox’s political focus.
With such a variety of successful content, the most engaging posts were certainly more diverse than in February.
What publisher posts performed best on Instagram in March 2025?
Although it no longer held the top three spots, Vogue still achieved a number of posts in the top ten. Two of those featured the Oscars, echoing last month’s GRAMMY success, but the top post was about the Billboard Women in Music awards, suggesting an increased interest from the publisher’s audience in music compared to movies.
LADbible had the top post overall with a viral video of a dog enjoying some ear rubs, and an in-house challenge between Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown also cracked the top ten.
Top posts on Instagram by engagement in March 2025 (50-publisher sample)
Unlike on TikTok, there was less room for outright news content in the top ten posts, with sports and entertainment dominant throughout.
View this post on Instagram
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While LADbible’s success was mostly driven by video, there were still a number of photo posts in the top ten, including Bleacher Report’s biggest one about Bronny James.
Interestingly, while most of the top sports posts were about basketball, none of them featured March Madness, which is a surprise given the popularity of the college tournament in terms of TV ratings.
March once again showed the value of high-quality photography for these publishers, with glamour and action shots from exclusive events coming out on top. Striking imagery from exclusive events and capturing moments in time are still proving successful on Instagram.
If you’d like to catch up on our recent TikTok study, you can find that here.
