Welcome to our latest monthly analysis of the social media performance of Sport for Business member organisations, compiled by Olytico in partnership with Sport for Business.
Across May, member organisations published 16,956 posts, generating 1,047,153 public engagements and 11,063,332 TikTok views.
The League of Ireland led the way in terms of overall activity across X, Facebook and Instagram, while standout engagement moments came from the Irish Women’s 4x400m relay team, Cricket Ireland and Tennis Ireland.
After considering X and Facebook in recent days, we now move to Instagram, showing a static level of engagement on 2025 and 10% ahead of 2024. It also has a first-time topper of the engagement charts for one of our challenger sports.
In the infographics below, we rank organisations across a range of metrics for each network, including the most active, most engaged, and most performing. Where possible, we have also included engagement rates per 1,000 followers to provide a more balanced view of performance.
As always, the analysis is based on publicly available data. It does not include paid or promoted content, and where percentage changes are referenced, they relate to movement from the previous month unless otherwise stated.
May 2026 Highlights on Instagram
Overview
Instagram activity rose 11% to 4,391 posts, with engagement up 36% on the previous month to 2.75 million.
That is slightly down on the engagements from 12 months ago, but 10% ahead of the figure seen in 2024.
Highlights
May 2026 Highlights on Instagram
The League of Ireland (437, +16%) completed the social media hat-trick as they were the most active account on Instagram in May, followed by the NIFL (336, -40%) and the SSE Airtricity Women’s Premier Division account (173, +38%).
Tennis Ireland (3,597, +4966%) topped the average engagement per post chart for the first time, followed by Ireland Football (3,425, +30%) and the GAA (2,678, -18%), both of which were down on engagements compared to twelve months ago.
Connacht Rugby and Horse Racing Ireland were two others beyond the top three to show an increase in engagements compared to where they were twelve months ago.
Tennis Ireland also led the engagements-per-1,000-followers metric with 12,907, driven by its most-engaged-with Instagram post of the month.
The standout content celebrated Naqi Rizvi’s victory in the BearingPoint Irish National Blind & VI Tennis Championships. After a tight match against Carlos Arbos, Rizvi came through on a tie-break scoreline of 1-4, 4-3, 10-5. The inspirational post has generated more than 144,000 public engagements to date.
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The sporting bodies listed in these Social media reports are full members of Sport for Business.
If you would like to be part of the Sport for Business community and see your organisation in our content, on our stages, and in the conversation happening every day around the commercial world of Irish Sport, email us today and let’s see what is possible.
Image Credit: Olympian Ciara Mageean, Olympic Federation of Ireland and Sportsfile.
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