Investigating the Goals and Motivations of Information Sharing in Instagram Educational Pages Successful in Visibility based on the Uses and Gratifications Theory

Instragram has become an important platform for Information sharing due to its usability, mobile-based, simplicity and user-friendly interface. Those who using this social network, have a variety of reasons and goals, such as communication, entertainment, or professional and business activities, keep update to their friends, and Information sharing. Also, some of them, share information on this social network to escape from the reality, social interaction, and spending time as a habit. The aim of this study, was to study and explorethe goal and motivations of Information sharing, onits educational pages which performanced successfully in visibility. This study was done based on use and gratification theory. This theory involves to how and why users use the media.

In order to explore and evaluate the goals and motivations of Information sharing on these pages, which share information in e-learning context, 30 Instagram educational pages were investigated using qualitative research method, the thematic analysis with exploratory approach. The information available on these pages, including Bio, content, social tagging behavior was observed and analyzed by Maxqda 12.3 software, that used for qualitative data analysis. The sample of this study selected based on competitive benchmarking. So, the targeted sample for this study was selected on the condition that investigated accounts should have more than 20 thousand followers and share information on a specific topic content such as skills, knowledge, or information. These accounts should have educational approach.  

The findings indicated that the goals and motivations of information sharing on these pages were various and different, but economic goals, job opportunities, personal and interpersonal interests, status, and social interaction along with informing goal were the main goals that who people sharing information on these pages had. Therefore, It seems that people that share educational information on this platform have different and various goal and motivations in their information sharing activity. These goals and motivations include economic benefits and personal branding.

Although the investigated pages were sharing Informationin the e-learning context, but they had other goals too. This finding, having the economic goals and the personal and job interests maybe due to the nature of the information sharing platform in the research, that is, Instagram. So, these account owners, although have an educational goal, but also had other goals and motivations. They pay attention to this fact that people look at information sharing on Instagram as a business, regardless the subject or theme of content. This could be for a reason that many businesses across the world has attracted to Instagram for its capabilities for build and grow different their businesses. It seems that the goals and motivations of Information sharing could be varied by platform publishing content and information.