Instagram Follower Engagement

19 November 2022

For most of my time on Instagram I had kept things very private and posted very infrequently. 2022 found me posting again, but rather than just sharing images from my life I wanted to treat it more as a creative outlet, means of self-expression, and a platform to provoke engagement and discussion with my friends. Below is one such post from this era of my instagram.

To create this image I scraped the likes and comments from the posts on my Instagram page and summed up the number of engagements from each of my followers. I then placed people into bins based on how many engagements they had made relative to the theoetical maximum possible.

I envisioned this kind of “meta” post to try and provoke my followers to think about their relationship with social media and instagram in particular:

How much of their engagement with the app actually involves meaningful interactions with people that they care about and have a personal relationship with?
How much of their self-worth is tied to likes and followers? An obvious jab at the hustle/influencer culture that is so prevalent on the platform.
By scraping the profile pictures of all my followers I also wanted to trigger a reflection on digital privacy, and the way that I had very easily collected data relating to each person in a way that they probably would never have expected.

Prior to posting I had expected this to be quite confronting and that some may have perceived this as some kind of breach of privacy. However, (ironically) people seemed to really enjoy this post and it received a lot of engagement.

At the time I only had 3 posts on my profile so there wasn’t much interesting data analysis to be done, but I intend to revisit this idea and make a follow-up post at the end of 2023 as a take on the “year in review” posts that are so common across digital platforms. By this time I will be able to do more interesting things like time series analysis and clustering. I could also incorporate the attributes of my followers (number of posts, number of follwers, number following) into the analysis to try and build a predictive model of engagement.