Instagram Trends

Masooma Haider, Bottom Line Writer

Courtesy of: gocrywolf.blogspot.com
Courtesy of: gocrywolf.blogspot.com

         Certainly Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook can be given credit for pioneering the social media galaxy. However, recent polls show that Facebook is not longer number one among teenagers. Instagram,  with Twitter following closely behind, has taken over. According to Piperjaffray’s latest report, over thirty-four percent of American teens prefer Instagram over all other social networks. With  Instagram, people are constantly checking their streams, posting a new photo, commenting on someone else’s or doing another one of the myriad actions Instagram presents. In fact, Instagram  reports there are 8,500 likes on a photo every second.

What is happening in the social media realm that keeps all those fingers tapping? This question can be answered by analyzing the most popular tags on photos, which are commonly known as  hashtags. A hashtag can be indicated using “#,” which was once known as the pound sign.
Some of the top ten hashtags, according to Webstagram, include: #love, #me, #follow, #followme, #like, and #instagood. One thing that can be noted about the general majority of these hot picks is that they concentrate around the individual, even going as far as to make a direct command to pay attention to the individual. Hashtags are used to draw attention to pictures in the hopes that the person will gain more followers. Indeed, this can be effective, considering instagrammers are constantly browsing the “popular feed.” Cosmopolitan states that photos captioned with a hashtag are 10 percent more likely to receive likes. Whether a person is looking for followers or not, hashtags are pervasively used.

The eighteenth on Webstagrams’s popular hashtags list is the one and only, #selfie. The development of the selfie is another intriguing aspect of social media. According to Teen Vogue, Instagram has more than 31 million photos tagged with #selfie. It is one of the most common types of post, found at least once in almost every account. What is a “selfie”? Merriam-Webster states, “a selfie is an image of oneself taken by oneself using a digital camera especially for posting on social networks.”

Perhaps to understand the #selfie, one must first look at what existed before the #selfie. Going back to the eighteenth century and before, artists would paint self-portraits. After the invention of photography in 1839, artists switched to photographic portraits. That same year, Joseph Draper captured the oldest photographic portrait known. However, the concept of taking a picture of one’s self, by one’s self, was not really popularized until the invention of mobile phones with front facing cameras. The intense popularity of the #selfie in recent times is in fact not surprising. Emarketer’s statistics show that over 1.75 billion people own a smartphone today, and that number continues to rise, allowing more and more people ease of access to take selfies.

Instagram is one of the most diverse and constantly changing social media platforms of the modern world. If one has not yet used hashtags, posted a #selfie or done the ALS ice bucket challenge, it would certainly be delusional to consider one’s self “up to date” with popular instagram trends.