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- Title
Hashtag usage and user engagement on Instagram: The case of #foodfestivals.
- Authors
CELUCH, KRZYSZTOF
- Abstract
In events and festivals, social media has emerged as a platform for co-creating value and enhancing engagement. In particular, the use of hashtags on social media enhances impressions, raises awareness towards a brand, and helps reach a broader audience. As such, this study aims at uncovering the extent to which hashtags influence user engagement on Instagram. It also provides an overview of how festival experiences are communicated on social media via hashtags. As different types of events and festivals are unique in nature, this study takes food festivals as the research context. Based on Instagram posts captioned with #foodfestivals, collocation analysis, linked analysis, and word trees were applied to visualize hashtag usage. A spearman correlation was conducted to assess the interplay between hashtags and user engagement. The findings reveal sweets and desserts to be the most popular feature, gaining attention for further investigation in food festivals. Furthermore, grounded in the notion of information overload, the findings suggest that the number of hashtags might not necessarily influence user engagement, whereas the length of hashtags and captions seems to have a negative impact on engagement rate. On the whole, this is a cross-disciplinary study that bridges data science, digital marketing, and applied psychology with events and festivals. Although this study is based in the context of food festival, the same notion can be replicated to other types of event. This research highlights the use of hashtags as one of the subtle yet persuasive factors in influencing user engagement when it comes to festival experiences.
- Subjects
TAGS (Metadata); SOCIAL media; INSTAGRAM (Web resource); FOOD festivals; INTERNET marketing
- Publication
Journal of Physical Education & Sport, 2021, Vol 21, p966
- ISSN
2247-8051
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.7752/jpes.2021.s2120