Motivations and hashtag patterns of Iranian digital natives on Instagram

Abstract

This article addresssed the behavioral patterns of digital natives, youth between 8 and 24 years in Instagram. for this reason, tries to firstly investigate the most popular hashtags used by Iranian digital natives, and then, to identify the incentives behind using these hashtags. at the first step by use of data mining, the popular hashtags of 534 users from digital natives collected and then by use of semi-structured interviews with 20 of them, their incentives and behavioral patterns identified. findings shows that hashtags 'Awli', 'best', 'jzb'. 'nice' were the most used hashtags within 15097 hashtags from 534 posts. the incentives are recognized as belogning, socializing, attraction, information seeking, empathy, announcing success, and declaring identity. this article argue that instagram creats a virtual world for digital natives that they recereate real world norms in this platform.

Keywords

• digital natives
• instagram
• incentive
• hashtag
• social media