What We Instagram: A First Analysis of Instagram Photo Content and User Types

By Yuheng Hu, Lydia Manikonda, Subbarao Kambhampati. International Conference on Web and Social Media, 2014

819 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Instagram is a relatively new form of communication where users can easily share their updates by taking photos and tweaking them using filters. It has seen rapid growth in the number of users as well as uploads since it was launched in October 2010. In spite of the fact that it is the most popular photo capturing and sharing application, it has attracted relatively less attention from the research community. In this paper, we present both qualitative and quantitative analysis on Instagram. We use computer vision techniques to examine the photo content. Based on that, we identify the different types of active users on Instagram using clustering. Our results reveal several insights about Instagram which were never studied before, that include: 1) Eight popular photos categories, 2) Five distinct types of Instagram users in terms of their posted photos, and 3) A user's audience (number of followers) is independent of his/her shared photos on Instagram. To our knowledge, this is the first in-depth study of content and users on Instagram.

Subfields: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a92831841307b513ca9c1b2c65499b08eb4c156

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Feeling Authentic on Social Media: Subjective Authenticity Across Instagram Stories and Posts (2021, background): “Both Stories and Posts allow applying filters or adjusting individual aspects of an image (Hu et al., 2014), hence affording similarly high levels of editability.”
Image-Chat: Engaging Grounded Conversations (2018, background): “In this work we take a step towards these goals by considering grounded dialogue involving openended discussion of a given image, a setting that is naturally fun for humans (Hu et al., 2014), and study neural conversational models for task.”
Picture Perfect: The Direct Effect of Manipulated Instagram Photos on Body Image in Adolescent Girls (2018, methodology): “Selfies were used because photos in this format are a popular trend on Instagram and other social network sites (Hu et al., 2014).”
Multi-Modal Open-Domain Dialogue (2020, background): “In order to better approach human-like ability, however, it is necessary that agents can converse with both textual and visual context, similarly to how humans interact in the real world; indeed, communication grounded in images is naturally engag-a ing to humans (Hu et al., 2014).”
Engaging Image Captioning via Personality (2018, background): “Communication grounded in images is naturally engaging to humans [18], for example billions are shared and discussed daily online.”
Engaging Image Chat: Modeling Personality in Grounded Dialogue (2018, background): “In this work we take a step towards these goals by considering the setting of grounded dialogue based on a given image, a setting naturally engaging to humans (Hu et al., 2014).”
Capitalizing on the look: insights into the glance, attention economy, and Instagram (2018, methodology): “Social media sites like Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat rank their users based on visibility.”
Children Seen But Not Heard: When Parents Compromise Children's Online Privacy (2015, background): “[18] manually coded the content of 50 user profiles to determine what types of content are posted by users.”
Social Comparison as the Thief of Joy: Emotional Consequences of Viewing Strangers’ Instagram Posts (2018, background): “In addition, Instagram profiles and updates are often public, which enables users to view posts from people who they are not connected to online or offline (Hu et al., 2014).”
Passive social networking site use and well-being: The mediating roles of social comparison and the fear of missing out (2019, background): “Social networking sites (SNSs) are widely used by U.S. adults, with 69% using Facebook, 37% using Instagram, 24% using Snapchat, and 22% using Twitter (Perrin & Anderson, 2019).”