Content Description on a Mobile Image Sharing Service: Hashtags on Instagram

Abstract

The mobile social networking application Instagram is a well-known platform for sharing photos and videos. Since it is folksonomy-oriented, it provides the possibility for image indexing and knowledge representation through the assignment of hashtags to posted content. The purpose of this study is to analyze how Instagram users tag their pictures regarding different kinds of picture and hashtag categories. For such a content analysis, a distinction is made between Food, Pets, Selfies, Friends, Activity, Art, Fashion, Quotes (captioned photos), Landscape, and Architecture image categories as well as Content-relatedness (ofness, aboutness, and iconology), Emotiveness, Isness, Performativeness, Fakeness, "Insta"-Tags, and Sentences as hashtag categories. Altogether, 14,649 hashtags of 1,000 Instagram images were intellectually analyzed (100 pictures for each image category). Research questions are stated as follows: RQ1: Are there any differences in relative frequencies of hashtags in the picture categories? On average the number of hashtags per picture is 15. Lowest average values received the categories Selfie (average 10.9 tags per picture) and Friends (average 11.7 tags per picture); for highest, the categories Pet (average 18.6 tags), Fashion (average 17.6 tags), and Landscape (average 16.8 tags). RQ2: Given a picture category, what is the distribution of hashtag categories; and given a hashtag category, what is the distribution of picture categories? 60.20% of all hashtags were classified into the category Content-relatedness. Categories Emotiveness (about 4.38%) and Sentences (0.99%) were less often frequent. RQ3: Is there any association between image categories and hashtag categories? A statistically significant association between hashtag categories and image categories on Instagram exists, as a chi-square test of independence shows. This study enables a first broad overview on the tagging behavior of Instagram users and is not limited to a specific hashtag or picture motive, like previous studies.