Key Image Attributes to Elicit Likes and Comments on Instagram

Abstract This article spotlights the relationship between likes and comments and the content of tourism photographs on Instagram with the aim of understanding users’ behavior and, thus, helping destination management organizations. Based on the stimulus-organism-response model, a content analysis was conducted of 1,094 pictures that received 131,116,800 likes and 2,859,448 comments. By combining content analysis and regression analysis, the results show that Instagrammers’ responses are influenced differently by different picture attributes, resulting in dissimilar behavior with regard to likes and comments. Specifically, likes, as immediate reactions, tend to be driven by content featuring people, views, or common habits. In contrast, comments, which require greater effort on the part of the Instagrammer, are elicited by the topic of festivals or hotels, colors such as cream, green, orange, or yellow, images of water or animals, and images featuring tourist activities, mostly at night. Multi-image or fake pictures negatively impact likes. By analyzing the content of the information provided by the uploaded photographs, a typology of photographic attributes is developed to offer clues for destination management organizations to enhance engagement with potential customers and Instagram users.