The Top 50 Most Followed Instagrammers, Visualized
I’m Greg Rafferty, a data scientist and photography enthusiast in the Bay Area. You can check out the full Tableau dashboard for this project on my Tableau Public profile. And check out my Instagram @gregrafferty! Feel to contact me with any questions or feedback!
In the summer of 2017, I wrote a Web Data Connector for Tableau which connected to Instagram’s Public Content API and allowed me to download the data from any publicly available posts. Naturally, I first built a Tableau dashboard to analyze my own Instagram account (Go follow me @gregrafferty!) and then turned to look at several other accounts I thought might be interesting and built fascinating Tableau Dashboards from their data. Check out this one for @natgeo (which seems to indicate something fishy going on during August 2016!), or this one for @realdonaldtrump, or this one for the hashtag #eclipse2017, which clearly shows the path the eclipse took across the United States on August 30th, 2017:
Unfortunately, Instagram recently dramatically reduced the call rate limit on this API and will soon kill the API entirely, so I’m retiring my Web Data Connector and thought I’d share some insights I found by looking at the combined posts of Instagram’s Top 50 Most Followed Users (all data as of September, 2017).
Click below to open the interactive dashboard.
First of all, who are these Instagrammers? Here they are, ordered by the number of followers:
Some basic statistics about the data set:
- The sum of all their followers is a whopping 3,070,353,066 users. That number is misleadingly large however, because if I follow both @instagram and @beyonce, I would be counted twice in there. Still, it’s a big number.
- The total number of posts in this data set is 157,944.
- The total number of likes is 65,669,459,900 and the total number of comments 1,345,709,525!
- Most users did not geotag a location on their photos, and of the users who did, they did not do so consistently; 2,903 unique locations in total are tagged.
So how many followers do each of these users have?
Instagram’s own account is by far the leader here, which would be expected as it’s always the first suggested follow for any new user signing up.
As anyone who has spent any time at all social networking knows, some users post ALL THE FRICKIN’ TIME and others a little bit more infrequently. Out of these Top 50 Instagrammers, who has posted the most?
National Geographic posts several times a day, as does 9GAG. At the end of the spectrum are Taylor Swift and Emma Watson.
Let’s look at the age of all of these accounts though, because total number of posts doesn’t tell the whole story.
Cara Delevingne has been around the longest followed shortly after by Victoria’s Secret. Some of them are indeed relative newcomers to Instagram and so justifiably have only a few posts; however Taylor Swift has been around forever, right? Turns out that in August 2017, she deleted all of her Instagram content and essentially started over as part of a PR stunt to announce her Reputation album. You can see Taylor Swift at the bottom there, beginning in August when she started her account over again. Adele holds the next youngest account, followed by David Beckham and Emma Watson.
Who are these users? What do they do?
As it turns out, most of them are musicians. Athletes come in second. And 5 out of these top 50, or 10% of the total (WHAAAAT?!?!), are members of the Kardashian/Jenner celebrity clan (Kim, Kendall, Kylie, Kourtney, and Khloe, for those of you who really care).
OK, but which groups get the most likes?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, photos of very pretty young models get a whole lot of likes per follower on average. But one group gets more, and that group consists of just a single user… NASA! Yay for science!
What if we take a look at the individual accounts, now who gets the most likes per follower?
Poor Chris Brown over there on the end. It seems a lot of people just hate-follow him but never like his posts :(. Emma Watson though, what a star. She gets on average almost 4 times the number of likes per follower as the next highest user! Her account is somewhat unique though, in that it’s relatively young and features very few photos compared to the others, so we might consider tossing this out as an outlier. You’ll notice Taylor Swift is the runner up, and she gained her millions of followers and then deleted all those older (and presumably less-liked) photos which effectively boosted her average.
One last question to answer though. If you’re a celebrity and you want to capture the most likes as possible, when should you post?
It seems the summer months are best! Earlier in the week tends to do a bit better as well. Definitely avoid making your big announcements mid-week in early winter; no one likes anything then.
Where are these celebs posting from? All over the world, it seems (largely thanks to National Geographic, whose posts are the purple dots).
Lastly, here’s a chart which looks pretty cool. I encourage you to check out the interactive dashboard if you want to dig deeper and explore this one some more. It shows the growth in likes per post for each user throughout the years. The points represent each individual post and the lines are the moving average for number of likes. The colors represent each user.
One pretty fun insight I noticed was that when Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber went through a very public breakup, they both were posting some pretty nasty things about each other. But when they got back together, as a sign of true love I’m sure, they went through their Instagram accounts and deleted all those nasty posts from the end of 2016 into the beginning of 2017. How romantic! Look at that gap in posts.
Finally, here are some of the more significant posts in the dataset:
The earliest post from one of the top 50 most followed users, by Cara Delevingne:
This is the platform’s most liked post ever (at least, as of September 2017), by Beyonce:
Here’s the second most liked post ever, also by Beyonce:
The third most liked post ever, by Selena Gomez:
And the fourth most liked post ever, by Cristiano Ronaldo:
The list of most liked posts is dominated by those three ‘grammers above; the next user to feature on the list is Ariana Grande, and here is her most liked post:
Here’s Emma Watson’s most liked post:
And Lionel Messi’s:
Here’s the most liked post by Instagram (how adorable):
Interesting that National Geographic’s and NASA’s most liked posts both feature the solar eclipse in August 2017! Here is Nat Geo’s:
And here is NASA’s:
And here’s my own most liked post, which also features the eclipse:
Here is the most liked post by Victoria’s Secret:
And I only list the most liked post from Victoria’s Secret as sort of a consolation for having the least liked post out of all 157,944 posts from the top 50 most followed Instagrammers. Here it is, with a relatively dismal 311 likes and only 4 comments (to put that in perspective, Beyonce’s most liked post has more than 11 million likes and 500,000 comments!):
If you want to explore the full Tableau dashboard which these images are pulled from, follow this link!
