Narrative Elements in Social Networks. Which Aspects Determine the Popularity of Photos on Instagram?

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 7,5/10, Maastricht University, language: English, abstract: The rapidly growing social network Instagram was founded in 2010 and offers users he possibility to share photos with their friends and the whole Instagram community. The community can rate these photos in their popularity by using the tools Likes and Comments. These measures of popularity reflect how the Instagram community perceives the uploaded photos. Besides private persons also businesses can upload photos of their products and use Instagram as a marketing channel. Therefore, for marketers it might be interesting to find out which factors influence the popularity of photos. This is exactly the purpose of the paper at hand. The main dependent variables of the research are the number of Likes and the number of Comments of each photo. The data was gathered by using the tool Statigr.am, which contains all photos that are uploaded on Instagram. The final dataset contained 209 observations that belonged to the two product categories Frozen Yoghurt and Cigarette. After the collection period, statistical tests were executed using descriptive statistics. The main independent variables belonged to the narrative elements that are described by Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006. The research showed that the type of narrative elements used has an influence on the popularity of photos and therefore this finding agrees with the expectations that were based on the literature. Furthermore, the research showed that the content of photos has an influence on the popularity. This was analyzed by the two product categories, of which the photos that contained the product Frozen Yoghurt had higher popularity scores. Additionally, the research showed that the number of Hashtags, which the uploading person can determine, has a strong influence on the popularity. In the sample at hand, photos with more Hashtags had higher popularity measures than photos with less Hashtags. Finally, the research rejected the assumption that graphical elements of photos such as camera angle and distance, as well as the use of filters and different light conditions has an influence on the popularity. In the sample at hand no clear relationship was found. Especially, the findings regarding the narrative elements and the Hashtags allow firms to design their product photos in the most appealing.