Spatio-temporal Analysis: Using Instagram Posts to Characterize Urban Point-of-interest

The urban growth enlarge the geographical boundaries of a city and foster the creation of new local points of interest (POI). Social Media posts provide useful information about the temporal behavior of residents when visiting such POIs. Analyzing the temporal distribution of visits benefit stakeholders working in decision-making, business planning and promotion strategies. Geographical and temporal information extracted from social media is specially useful in developing countries where the lack of digital information is remarkable. In our study, we collect more than 38K Instagram posts from users who live in Guayaquil, Ecuador and propose a spatio-temporal analysis to identify daily visitor patterns for nine different POIs categories. The spatio-temporal analysis reveals that a urban neighborhood which offers more places with different categories will have a high number of visitors.