Social Network Analysis of Related Hashtags on Instagram (using InstaCrawlR)

Analyzing Brand Positioning as Perceived by Instagram Users

Please note the March 2019 Update: https://medium.com/@jonas.schroeder1991/update-instacrawlr-still-crawling-6500cd376ea3

A couple of weeks ago, the social media platform Instagram announced that their userbase has reached the threshold of 1B. What originally started as a photo-sharing App for amateur mobile photographers in 2010 has developed into the place-to-be for anyone interested in beauty, fashion, health, lifestyle — basically anything of relevance in today’s world.

From a researcher’s perspective, the huge amount of textual and visual user-generated content can offer very interesting insights. In order to work with such large sets of data, computer programs become handy. In this blog post I present to you InstaCrawlR, a couple of R scripts that I wrote recently, and how you can use these scripts yourself to do things like social network analysis of related hashtags on Instagram.

How it works

InstaCrawlR (GitHub) is a collection of four scripts, each developed for a certain task. These scripts can be used to downloads the most recent posts for any specified hashtag, automatically extract related hashtags from posts, and create a graph that can be plotted to show the relationships between main and related hashtags. I don’t want to get too technical here, but if you’re…