2018 was all about celebrating the GoPro Family. The community we have built through social media continues to grow, fueling passions and creativity worldwide, with Instagram as our hub. And in 2018, by focusing on growth, community and quality, the GoPro Instagram grew to 15 million followers and secured its position as a leader in sharing adventures, experiences and innovations.
The GoPro Instagram inspires followers and first-time watchers to think outside the box, while simultaneously serving as the most effective platform for the GoPro Community to become more educated and foster real connections amongst international communities. We led with inspiration, encouraged creativity and rewarded content by supporting our community for submitting their content to us with opportunities to earn awards and be featured on our feed.
In 2018, the mantra was simple: Be first. Be bold. Expect the unexpected.
With over 20 GoPro Instagram accounts representing countries around the world, we put an emphasis on sharing diverse content to relate with all corners of our audiences. We strive for a mix that drives conversions, conversations and content submissions to the GoPro Awards program; along with specific challenges such as the Million Dollar Challenge, which received (25,000 submissions in a three-month span).
Share the love, by showing the love. In order to stay true to our core, our Instagram delivers stoke, offers education and listens—as well as responds—to feedback. Our community management is global and always on, commenting on GoPro posts, answering questions, offering Pro-Tips and engaging with direct messages regularly.
As a goal, GoPro strives to remain authentic, adventurous and informative. Best in class, we made sure our strategy encompassed not just owned content, but user-generated as well. In fact, we have a team sifting through GoPro Awards submissions daily to find content gold and give the GoPro Family the opportunity to have their photos and videos shared with millions of mesmerized viewers. The overall GoPro Instagram presence is devoted to celebrating these moments captured by the GoPro Family—made up of our users, advocates and athletes.
We believe that life is made up of amazing moments, stories and people. Instagram has continued to act as a hub for our 16.7M total followers to foster new connections and ideas, inspiring others to capture, create and share the unexpected. Storytelling, passion sharing and moment capturing are all elements that bring GoPro to life.
We are innovative. We are fearless. We are family.
We are GoPro.
With efforts focused on growth, community, + top-notch quality, our Instagram saw huge results in 2018. We expanded our audience by 1.3M users to 16.7M in 2018. These fans are frothing for GoPro content, giving us double taps, re-shares and comments over 113.5M times. Our focus on community driven, celebratory content is exactly what they're looking for. On just the @GoPro handle, we garnered over 178M video videos, and 191M+ from all of our international handles combined. Our top performing photo of the entire year was user-generated, reaching nearly 500K likes.
Our community is talking about us behind our backs, in the best way possible, with 40.4M uses of #GoPro by the end of 2018. We're generating content from these users through our Awards program and the word is spreading with over 92K mentions of #GoProAwards. Finally, we launched the new #GoProHERO7 in September of 2018, and already have nearly 260K hashtag mentions.
