Say you’re a watch-guy and your table buddy at work, whom you’re responsible for having converted into a watch-guy, is raving about some new watch that’s just been announced. What do you do? ‘Cos now, he’s set you itching to find out what this new amazing watch looks like. Right?
If you’ll allow me to be so bold, can I suggest that in that moment you’re probably reaching for your mobile phone — not so that you can Google the watch — but au contraire, so that you can look at the watch on Instagram first. Just like every other watch-guy awake at that given hour.
It is absolutely astounding how, in the past few years, the watch community has congregated around Instagram like nothing else ever seen before in the industry.
You could compare it to the likes of some watch forums back in the day, but the sheer number of impressions, views and “double taps” that you get from a well-taken, well-timed image post on the platform — just in terms of the numbers it generates, and the time within which those numbers are generated — is simply unheard of.
It’s no wonder that more and more watch brands make new watch announcements on their corporate Instagram accounts long before they do so on their dot-coms.