From 67K to 118K: How a 130-Year-Old Broom Brand Added 51,000 Instagram Followers in 22 Months

+76% audience growth. 35 million views. Shares up 1,374%. The story of a content + giveaway engine built for how Instagram actually rewards brands.

By The Numbers

Where it started

Libman has been helping families clean up real life since 1896 — family-owned, operated in Illinois, and on the shelf at Walmart, The Home Depot, Costco and Target. But in October 2024, @cleanwithlibman told a different story: roughly 67,000 followers, shrinking month over month, and posts earning a few dozen likes in the most crowded content category on Instagram. The brand’s biggest product launch in years was on the horizon, and it needed an audience that would actually show up for it.

The engine

Cumberland Creative’s answer was not a posting schedule. It was a social growth engine with four gears: culture-timed giveaways engineered for the signals Instagram rewards, video-first content produced by our own crew, a themed monthly calendar built around how families actually live, and targeted amplification with relentless measurement. Each gear works on its own. Together they compound — every giveaway grows the audience that sees the next reel, and every reel warms the audience for the next giveaway.

The giveaways are the accelerant. A bracket-style “Road to Clean” during March Madness. “Caption the Mess” for football season. “Summer of Soccer” for the World Cup. “Spin to Win” to launch the Wonder Spin Mop. Every entry mechanic — comments as votes, tag-a-friend, share-to-Stories bonuses, multi-round brackets — is built to generate comments, shares and saves, the three things the algorithm pays for in reach. The payoff: giveaway content was just 7% of what we posted and produced 44% of all interactions, running at 37.6% engagement of reach — five times the everyday feed and roughly eight times the Instagram average for brands. Reels were 58% of the feed and drove 69% of all likes and 72% of reach.

The results

The growth was steady, not spiky. From October 2024 to August 2026, @cleanwithlibman grew from 66,932 to 118,146 followers — +51,214, or +76% — with net gains in 20 of 22 months and a peak of +7,894 in a single month during the first March Madness bracket. Just as important is who showed up: the audience is roughly three-quarters women, concentrated in the 35–64 range and 96% U.S. — the household decision-makers who actually buy brooms and mops.

Engagement grew faster than the audience. Across 314 posts and reels the account earned 111,061 interactions, and compared with the equivalent period before Cumberland took over, feed-post shares were up 1,374%, comments up 396%, saves up 98% and likes up 67%. The eight flagship giveaways alone reached 7.4 million people and brought in 27,000 comments, 11,500 shares and 31,000 new followers — more than half of the account’s net growth.

Why it works

Why does this work when so much brand social doesn’t? Because we build the calendar around culture, not the catalog — Libman’s biggest moments were March Madness, a movie premiere, the NBA Draft, the World Cup and football Sundays, not product features. Because we engineer mechanics for the algorithm instead of hoping for engagement. And because strategy, production and media live under one roof: the same team plans the calendar, shoots the reels, writes the captions, runs the boosts and reads the report — so when a moment breaks, the content is live that morning.

It also works because we measure everything and change our minds when the data says so. Every giveaway is benchmarked against the last one — Caption the Mess more than quadrupled the followers gained over the giveaway before it and Mop Madness reached 23% more people — so ten giveaways in, we know exactly which mechanics drive comments, which drive shares, and which drive follows.

Summary

Libman is not a fashion label or a DTC startup. It is a 130-year-old maker of brooms and mops. If a content + giveaway engine can add 51,000 engaged followers and multiply shares fourteen-fold for a cleaning brand, it can work for almost any consumer brand with a real product and a real audience. Ready to build your own growth engine? Let’s talk about what a video-first, culture-led social program could do for yours.

Community Engagement

We don’t wait for audiences to find Libman — we put the brand in conversations already going viral. By leaving timely, funny comments on culturally relevant content, Libman earns organic visibility far beyond its own feed. The best comments become content themselves, driving likes, replies and profile visits while making a 130-year-old brand feel current, human and part of internet culture.

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