The winners on social media at the SIHH 2018

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The winners on social media at the SIHH 2018 - SIHH 2018
3 minutes read
A look at the most popular posts and most successful brands on social media at this year’s SIHH.

Whether you’re a watch lover or a watch brand, there was no escaping the ubiquity of social media at this year’s SIHH. Hashtags featured prominently in many brands’ promotional material and at the end of every press presentation, there was the usual scrum of journalists fighting to be the first to get the new watches on their wrist for the all-important wristshot. But who were the real winners in social media at the SIHH this year? The so-called influencers or the brands themselves? I decided to dig deeper with a thorough analysis of the hashtag #sihh2018 on the two networks where hashtags matter most: Twitter and Instagram.

Instagram – celebrities beat wristshots

The most popular posts on Instagram that were tagged #sihh2018 did not feature a single watch and were not posted from the Palexpo. They came instead from the lavish gala dinners and parties hosted by the brands during the week, which are attended by celebrities with huge social media followings. Whether you measure the posts by number of likes or comments, there is little difference between the top three posts. Here are the statistics provided by Postchup based on likes.  

    1. Barbara Palvin (@realbarbarapalvin, 7.4 million followers)
      The top post from the week on Instagram came from Hungarian model Barbara Palvin whose photo from the Piaget party earned 438,610 likes and 2,655 comments.
    2. Hugh Jackman (@thehughjackman, 16.1 million followers)
      Posting with the subheading “paid partnership with Montblanc” the Australian actor’s red-carpet photo from the Montblanc party was liked 211,961 times and commented on 500 times.
    3. Juan Mata Garcia (@juanmatagarcia, 4.9 million followers)
      The Spanish footballer swapped the turf of Old Trafford for the red carpet at the IWC party during the SIHH. His post from the evening garnered 86,678 likes and 556 comments.

According to Postchup, from 12th – 22nd January, a total of 17,296 photos were tagged #sihh2018 on Instagram by 3,840 different users, for an average of 1,730 posts per day and 4.5 posts per user. Activity peaked on Wednesday morning and dropped off considerably from Thursday afternoon. On average, each post had 410 likes and just under five comments.

Frequency of posts on Instagram using the #sihh2018 hashtag

Postchup also has an exciting new beta feature that uses machine learning to detect objects in the most popular photos around a particular hashtag. It seems to be quite accurate, throwing up items such as “red carpet”, “suit”, “tuxedo” and “wristwatch” for the hashtag #sihh2018. Yet the latter has less than a 30% chance of being in a photo posted with this hashtag, compared with 60% for a “person”, “human” or “people”.

Objects recognised in Instagram posts with the #sihh2018 hashtagThere is a simpler way of analysing Instagram hashtags, using the search function in the Instagram app itself. This revealed that, as of Monday 22nd January at 9am Swiss time, there were actually fewer Instagram posts with the tag #sihh2018 (21,212) than #sihh2017 (27,876). I also used this simple feature to measure the effectiveness of some of the hashtags that the brands promoted during the week. This is only a selection based on those I noted during the week, but compared with the virality of the celebrity posts seen above, the results are disappointing. 

Top 10 Instagram hashtags for the SIHH 2018

#iwc150 2412
#baumatic 777
#ragingmechanics 755
#triplesplit 585
#madeofmakers 622
#jlcpolaris 556
#pallweber 203
#altiplanoultimate 114
#altiplanoultimateconcept 114
#piagetultimate 12

Source: Postchup (12-22 January 2018)

Twitter – Büyüküstün beats Cumberbatch

The story is similar for Twitter, as the brands with the biggest influencers top the table. Turkish actress Tuba Büyüküstün attended the IWC Schaffhausen party and, whether you spell her name with or without the umlauts, was tagged more than British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who was announced as the new face of Jaeger-LeCoultre just before the start of the SIHH and attended the brand’s party on Monday night.

Top 10 Twitter hashtags for the SIHH 2018

#sihh2018 3095
#iwc150 907
#iwcsihh 892
#tubabüyüküstün 430
#tubabuyukustun 368
#benedictcumberbatch 254
#jlcsihh 211
#piaget 145
#iwc 143
#hmoserandcie 127

Source: Twitonomy (17 January 3.29pm to 21 January 11.05pm)

The watch brands themselves were, however, the most engaging Twitter users around the #sihh2018 hashtag, with IWC, Piaget and Jaeger-LeCoultre topping the list. The fact that Audemars Piguet has more followers than any of these brands proves what many social media professionals already know: the number of followers of an account alone should never be used as a metric.   

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