Telling stories with network data: Spring on Instagram

The days are getting longer, the first flowers come into bloom and a very specific set of hashtags are spreading through Social Media platforms – it’s spring again! In this blogpost I took a look at spring-related pictures on Instagram. Right now, the use of hashtags on Instagram has not entered the mainstream. For this analysis, I took a look at the latest 938 images tagged with “#spring”. The average rate was 12 spring-tagged pictures a day, but this rate will be increasing during the next days and weeks.

The following hashtags were most frequently used in combination with the #spring hashtag:

  1. Flower(s) (198 mentions, 2639 likes)
  2. Sun (160, 2018)
  3. Tree(s) (130, 2230)
  4. Nature (128, 2718)
  5. Love (119, 1681)
  6. Girl (107, 1469)
  7. Sky (89, 2057)
  8. Fashion (64, 924)
  9. Beautiful (61, 1050)
  10. Blue (59, 1234)

Although I would associate spring with green, the Instagram community has other preferences:

  1. Blue (59 mentions, 1234 likes)
  2. Pink (42, 396)
  3. Green (40, 444)
  4. White (29, 457)
  5. Yellow (22, 369)
  6. Red (17, 230)
  7. Black (16, 267)
  8. Brown (7, 117)
  9. Orange (7, 77)
  10. Grey (3, 50)

So these are the spring colors according to Instagram hashtags

Here are the top 15 most liked spring pictures on Instagram right now:

Here’s the tag network that is showing the relations between the 2445 other unique hashtags that appeared in connection with #spring (see PDF):

Instagram wouldn’t be half the fun without the various filters to apply to the images. But #spring is best enjoyed in natural form. 28% of all #spring posts were posted without any additional filter:

  1. Normal (261)
  2. X-Pro II (91)
  3. Rise (83)
  4. Amaro (81)
  5. Lo-fi (68)
  6. Hefe (54)
  7. Earlybird (48)
  8. Hudson (41)
  9. Sierra (34)
  10. Valencia (33)

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