Gender-Specific Tagging of Images on Instagram

Abstract

Instagram is widely known and used as a social media application for visual content. In order to categorize and describe their posted content as well as to make it retrievable, users can assign hashtags to each posting. What kind of hashtags do female and male Instagram users assign to their picture postings? Which differences and similarities exist? This study analyzes gender-specific image tagging behavior on Instagram. Therefore, a content analysis of, in total, 14,951 hashtags from 1,000 Instagram pictures (respectively 500 pictures posted by female and male users) was performed. The subjects of the 1,000 Instagram pictures belong to overall ten picture categories (100 pictures per category): Activity, Architecture, Art, Captioned Photo, Fashion, Food, Friends, Landscape, Pet, and Selfie. Seven categories exist for the coding of the hashtags: Content-relatedness, Emotiveness, Fakeness, “Insta”-Tags, Isness, Performativeness, and Sentences. On average, women assigned 14 hashtags to their postings, whereas men used one hashtag more. For both genders, hashtags belonging to the category Content-relatedness were the most used (over 55% of assigned hashtags). Second most assigned (over 17%) were Isness related hashtags. Generally, females used slightly more emotional hashtags, whereas men assigned Isness and “Insta”-Tags in a higher frequency than females. “Insta”-Tags were assigned in high frequencies (over 22%) to Pet pictures by both genders. With under 2%, females and males did not use many Sentences hashtags. As a chi-square test of independence shows, there exists a small statistical association between hashtag and picture categories for male and female Instagram users, respectively.