How and Why We Share: The Need for Social Media Awareness about Generic Hashtag and Visual Composition Conventions
Despite today’s discussion revolving around social media giants such as Instagram and Tumblr, a separate, but just as important, phenomenon quickly became the connection between these readings: sharing, repackaging, or recontextualizing content online. Daniel Miller’s “Crafting the Look” does a great service by anthropologically going into detail with the types of content that is shared across primarily the Instagram–and a bit of Twitter–platform. With this said, the data gathered in Miller’s piece is just a beginning to truly understanding what catches social media users’ eyes, influencing them enough to share, like, or comment on the content that is on their feed. Social media users ought to be aware and critical of the strategies users implement in an attempt to engage their audience because such an awareness stymies passively imbibing content that is specifically engineered to capture one’s attention.
One of those strategies employed by users of both Instagram, Twitter, and most recently, Facebook, is the inclusion of hashtags in captions, tweets, and statuses, respectively; rather than being blasé about an aspect of these platforms that seems insignificantly additive, one ought to scrutinize the content and number of hashtags those they follow employ. This sentiment was discussed in Daniel Wuebben’s “Getting Likes” by way of the implicit genre rules Wuebben’s class came up with; the fact that #hashtagtrashy (76) is even a concept users of the platform can, and do, understand signifies that hashtag convention holds clout in consuming this type of online content. Additionally, the call for researching the number of hashtags used on these platforms has been looked at with increasing interest throughout the last couple years. Emilio Ferrara, Roberto Interdonato, and Andrea Tagarelli briefly answered this call in their 2014 piece “Online Popularity and Topical Interests through the Lens of Instagram” where they found a power law tagging distribution between more users employing a just a few tags versus many. With this information, users ought to anticipate that these hashtag’s generic constraints–whether qualitatively or quantitatively–ultimately mold and impact the content they enjoy.
Although images apply to almost all social media platformers in 2017, Instagram’s pièce de résistance is undoubtedly visual composition content; categorizing this circulated visual content as well as recognizing certain compositional elements effect user engagement, forces consumer awareness. While Miller’s aforementioned piece catalogues a considerable amount of Instagram content, other research has attempted to decipher what visual compositions are more stimulating than others. Saeideh Bakhshi, David Shamma, and Eric Gilbert’s 2014 piece “Faces Engage Us: Photos with Faces Attract More Likes and Comments on Instagram” find that the inclusion of a face within an Instagram picture “increases the chances of receiving likes by 38% and comments by 32%.” Such a finding is not only extremely significant with regard to the content that users enjoy, but also with the type of content that ends up being shared. Despite Wuebben dismissing particularly “likes” on social media, Instagram will from time to time share an image to one’s feed depending on how many “friends” have also “liked” the image. The advent of this research may lead to the development of visual composition conventions that users must be aware of while consuming said content.
Ultimately, it is important to realize that educators are not the only community looking at social media engagement and interaction; these various studies are becoming increasingly interesting to individuals within various disciplines. Armed with this knowledge, such communities will certainly utilize social media platforms in a way that will psychologically hack users’ minds: through the qualitative and quantitative use of hashtags as well as through visual composition strategies such as posting pictures with faces. In this way, awareness and a critical eye with which social media users engage online will be essential to employ.