Instagram has been in the news a lot lately, between its new brand engagement programs and its recent surge in display ad revenue {links no longer active}. However, not all the news is good for the media-driven site.

Findings from Locowise indicate that both growth and engagement for Instagram have dropped off quite a bit last month. How bad Let’s look at the numbers.

Looking across 2,500 Instagram profiles and tracking their progress throughout the month, Locowise found that average follower growth dwindled down to just .34 percent, down 77 percent from May.

In addition, organic growth also took a nosedive, dropping from 1.95 percent in April to below .35 percent in July. It was gradual at first, going down to 1.48 percent in May, but then dropped a full percentage point in June, down to .49. That said, Locowise did note that it’s still better than the .21 percent organic page likes growth on Facebook, and the .19 percent growth on Twitter.

As far as engagement goes, it declined in general, down from 2.8 percent back in April to 2.12 percent in July. That still shows improvement over Facebook (.52 percent) and Twitter (.15 percent), but there are still signs for concern.

Other statistics that came from the report are as follows:

  • The 2,500 profiles Locowise studied posted 2.39 posts per day on average
  • 93.29 percent of all the posts were images, while 11.28 percent of all comments were on videos, despite video being only 6.71 percent of all content posted
  • 97.64 percent of all interactions were likes, 2.36 percent were comments and the response time for the first comment to be posted was 49 seconds on average-Photos engaged 2.16 percent of followers on average, while videos engaged 1.58 percent
  • Up to 24 million Instagram users could be bot accounts. These are fake accounts that are active on the platform and are interacting with other users. These spam accounts have posted 6 images on average and have a follower-to-following ratio of 1:41. (That would put a serious dent in the 300 million monthly users the site has.)

There’s no word from Instagram yet on reaction to these results, but we’ll see what it has to say in the months ahead.

In the meantime, the full report can be found here.