The Top 10 Hashtags for Fine Watchmaking on Instagram
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William McNish
Strategic Planner at RE-UP
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Instagram is increasingly becoming an important tool for Fine Watchmaking brands to access a new, younger audience that might not be as exposed to the Historic Maisons of Fine Watchmaking.
Another opportunity here is for brands to build communities within Instagram, whether it be through hashtags, tagging or creating their own pages – similar to what the Vintage Rolex Asylum has done.
Although in with around 700 million users and 34 billion photos shared it is easy to get lost among what you’re searching for – here’s where we come in.
There are thousands of hashtags related to Fine Watchmaking, but which have the best content? But what hashtag the most pictures of Swiss watches or the most photos actually taken by users?
Well we’ve taken a sample from 10 of the biggest Fine Watchmaking hashtags on Instagram and put them through several different criteria, ranking them from 1-10 in order to decide which is the best for searching.
Methodology:
To keep things simple, we skimmed a sample of the top 100 images from each hashtag and ranked them by these four factors:
Number of images: quite simply put, the amount of images that have been uploaded with the use of that hashtag
Amount of likes on top images: each hashtag, before it jumps into all the images, includes the top 9 most ‘liked’ images of that day. We worked out an average based on those top 9 to look at which content was the most loved.
Percentage of ‘Fine Watchmaking: using the ‘White Paper on Fine Watchmaking’ as a guide to which brands to include, we split each hashtag down into percentage of images that were Fine Watchmaking / Non Fine Watchmaking / No watch in image.
Type of content: brands take beautiful pictures, it’s hard to deny that. But what most of us like to see are real watches on real people. We split each hashtag down into these four areas:
• User generated content: content created by the community
• Brands: any image that was posted on a branded account
• Press: an image taken by a brand but re-posted by a community member
• No: an image that didn’t include a watch.
Once we collated all the data we set about ranking them against one another, scoring them from 1-10 for each criterion. Once the scores were added together, the closer to zero would be the winner. To make things easier, we will give a scoring breakdown for each hashtag.
Here are the 10 best hashtags for Fine Watchmaking on Instagram:
1) #watchporn
No. of images: 2.2 mil (2nd)
No. of likes: 33, 386 (3rd)
% of Fine Watchmaking: 58% (3rd)
Type of content: 72% (2nd)
It sounds worse than it is, we promise. #watchporn finished in the top three for every criteria we looked at. You’ll never run out of images to look at; only 4% of the images weren’t of watches with almost 60% being within the Fine Watchmaking perimeter. A huge number of the images were generated by the community with an almost equal split other than that of Branded / Press content, with 11% and 13% retrospectively. It’s difficult to disagree that this is, overall, the best hashtag for Fine Watchmaking.
2) #watchfam
No. of images: 946k (7th)
No. of likes: 24,060 (6th)
% of Fine Watchmaking: 58% (3rd)
Type of content: 72% (2nd)
Apparently the watch community likes to call themselves a family… #watchfam was actually remarkably similar to the number 1 slot, the only difference being less images and less likes. It actually had less images that didn’t include a watch – only 3% – and the split for Branded / Press content was 11% to 14%. A great hashtag and one you should definitely have a scroll through if you love Fine Watchmaking as much as we do.
3) #watchoftheday
No. of images: 1.4mil (4th)
No. of likes: 39,448 (1st)
% of Fine Watchmaking: 54% (6rd)
Type of content: 54% (9th)
Really, #watchoftheday has managed to climb its way up the rankings without deserving to be here. Okay so it has got a lot of content and recieves a great deal of likes, but the issue here is that approximately half of the content is generated by users and of that, only half includes Fine Watchmaking brands. 10% of the content actually included no images of watches at all and 21% of the images were simply regrams of press images, which I guess is better than content from brands themselves. Not a bad hashtag at all, but probably higher up than it deserves to be.
4) #watchaddict
No. of images: 954k (6th)
No. of likes: 18,349 (8th)
% of Fine Watchmaking: 65% (1st)
Type of content: 61% (6th)
Arguably the most important part of these hashtags is the amount of images related to ‘Fine Watchmaking’. If that was the case, then #watchaddict comes up trumps. With ⅔ of all images being related to brands with the Fine Watchmaking Perimeter and only 3% non-watch related images. If you’re looking for pictures of watches, this hashtag is the top. The downside however, if that only 61% is user generated content, with 10% being branded images and a massive 26% being re-posts and press images.
4) #watchnerd
No. of images: 857k (8th)
No. of likes: 36,231 (2nd)
% of Fine Watchmaking: 53% (7th)
Type of content: 71% (4th)
Let down by its number of images, #watchnerd was actually a really interesting hashtag. Although just over ½ of the content was related to Fine Watchmaking, those images that were part of the Perimeter included some really interesting brands and watches that we didn’t see in a lot of the other hashtags. It can also be noted that it has a huge percentage of UGC.
6) #wristporn
No. of images: 1.3mil (5th)
No. of likes: 24,545 (7th)
% of Fine Watchmaking: 55% (5th)
Type of content: 68% (5th)
Fairly average across the board, this hashtag sits exactly where it deserves to be. It has a pretty huge amount of images with a great amount of content coming from the community. The biggest downside of this hashtag is the fact that over 10% of the content has nothing to do with watches at all, which is the second highest on the list. Oh, and it includes a lot of wrist shots… as you’d expect.
7) #watchgeek
No. of images: 788k (9th)
No. of likes: 27,030 (5th)
% of Fine Watchmaking: 52% (8th)
Type of content: 76% (1st)
Pretty average across the board, #watchgeek was much similar to #watchnerd. This hashtag includes a lot of cool shots, even though just over 50% of the images were of Fine Watchmaking brands. To make up for that, there is a huge amount of user-generated content and only 4% non-watch related content. That means that if you like looking at watches, Fine Watchmaking or not, this is definitely the hashtag for you.
8) #watches
No. of images: 5.9mil (1st)
No. of likes: 30,564 (4th)
% of Fine Watchmaking: 30% (10th)
Type of content: 41% (10th)
If it wasn’t for this having SO many images with a lot of likes, it wouldn’t even be on this list. Obviously, because of the sheer amount, it has managed to make its way slightly higher up the list. However, just less than ⅓ of images are within the Fine Watchmaking Perimeter and over 20% weren’t actually related to watches at all. There was a surprising amount of branded content on this hashtag – usually low quality watch brands, straps, or bracelet brands that include watches also.
9) #swisswatches
No. of images: 157k (10th)
No. of likes: 18,157 (9th)
% of Fine Watchmaking: 65% (1st)
Type of content: 60% (7th)
Adding this hashtag in because it’s a favourite of the FHH, we thought it would end up higher. However, it is pushed down by its comparatively low number of images and likes. It does however, have a huge percentage of images that relate to Fine Watchmaking with a really low percentage of images not related to watches at all. It’s also interesting to add that over 25% of the images were press images and only 11% being branded.
10) #watchesofinstagram
No. of images: 1.3mil (3rd)
No. of likes: 18,060 (10th)
% of Fine Watchmaking: 45% (9th)
Type of content: 56% (8th)
Usually seen as the archetypal hashtag for watches, we have managed to prove this wrong. Despite a pretty huge amount of content, the number of likes is fairly low. The percentage of Fine Watchmaking content was low, as was the amount of user-generated content. To add to this, over 15% of the content had nothing to do with watches at all. It may be used a lot, but in terms of what we’re looking for here, it definitely isn’t the best!
