Information Tagging Behavior in the Instagram based on Social Tagging Theory

Findability is a critical factor of usability and visibility in information architecture. One of the preparations developed to support the findability of social networks is the use of social tagging. Social tagging is an effective way for users to organize, manage, share and search various types of resources. This research done with aim of investigate information tagging behavior and the degree to which the content themes were matched in the educational and successful pages in Instagram visibility, to reach a model for social tagging that can be found to increase the information findability on Instagram that leads to success in information visibility on this social network site. This was a qualitative and exploratory study, carried out through thematic analysis. Thematic analysis is a way to see the text, the good perception and understanding of apparently unrelated information, qualitative information analysis, systematic observation of person, group, position, organization or culture; the transformation of quantitative data into quantitative data. In this regard, more than 2,800 labels (hashtags), from the Instagram theme and educational pages, were selected as a targeted sample based on a competitive bench-marking approach, and analyzed. While classifying hashtags, they were matched to the theme of the contents. Theses hashtags were surveyed from shared posts in 30 selected pages that picked by purposed sampling.     The findings showed that most content with more than 42% of the posts surveyed was related to the photo and the lowest content was allocated to the film with more than 26%. 2844 hashtags dedicated to 300 Instagram posts were categorized into thematic, critical, exclusive, common, descriptive, emphasis, location and event categories. The subject, common, and exclusive tags and hashtags were assigned more to content and used less to emphatic and critical hashtags. Having a well-defined and policy in using of hashtags, the assignment of subject and related hashtags to content, the use of exclusive hashtags for customizing and branding were the behaviors that were showed in these pages in regard of using social tagging.  The findings also indicated that 76 percent of the investigated hashtags matched to the theme of the shared content and were related to the main topic and theme of these pages. This can also cause networking among pages in same theme. The co-occurrence of the theme codes and subject hashtags suggests that the subject code has a co-occurrence with a large number of theme codes, which is due to the fact that many pages have focused on subject hashtags among a variety of hashtags. Investigations showed that the selected pages in the posts surveyed used a specific pattern for hashtaging. Most hashtags were in Persian, and in many cases hashtags contributed to the understanding of visual content because they were sharing the main theme of the content. Successful pages in visibility have more applied subject hashtags in the same time they used less and more the other categories. The type of tags assigned to the content depended on the pages' context. Tagging behavior may reflect information sharing motivations and the hashtags assigned in educational pages can be used as a pattern for the pictures organization, according to their relevance to content theme.