Temporal Analysis of User Engagement on Instagram

Sammanfattning: Social media platforms have during the last decade expanded immensely in both the number of users and posts. An extensive number of previous studies have observed how users engage on these platforms to study how social systems work. However, compared to other social media platforms, Instagram has been less extensively researched. This work analyses user engagement on the social media platform Instagram for different characteristics related to posts, uploaders, and media files, consisting of photos and videos. What differentiates this work from others is studying the temporal dynamics of users' engagement across albums, photos, and videos. The results show that album posts receive the highest number of interactions and have the longest engagement lifespan, which is followed by photo posts. Additionally, the most important characteristic that attracts users' interactions is related to the uploader and includes their social network size and uploading rate. Further, different categories of users are analysed with respect to the post type. Compared to other influencer groups, brands and other types of organisations receive fewer interactions and musicians tend to have more loyal followers on Instagram. The conducted analysis may influence brands' and influencers' marketing strategies on various social media platforms and the result can influence the creation of analytical models to predict the temporal dynamics of user engagement on Instagram.