Initial Exploration on an Effective Social Media Analytics Method and Algorithm for Instagram Hashtags

Over the years, social media has brought many benefits to different fields, especially in the business sector. Most of the existing organizations have taken these benefits to actively engage with the public to increase their online business value. The use of hashtags on numerous social media platforms especially on Instagram is one of the highly used benefits. By tagging specific postings, business organizations are able to promote and communicate with their customers directly in a more interactive manner. In this article, the authors are exploring the following: (1) to determine the effectiveness of the existing analytics method (text identification and trend analysis) for analyzing Instagram hashtag data and; (2) to determine the effectiveness of existing analytic techniques such as Naïve Bayes and Support Vector Machines (SVM) suited for the selected analytics method. As a result, the authors have identified that the combination of Trend Analysis method and SVM are an effective social media analytics approach for analyzing Instagram hashtag data.