Temporal variability of emotions in social media posts

Employing the metadata from 627,632 Instagram posts for the Austrian capital city of Vienna over the period of October 30th, 2011 to February 7th, 2018, the present study extracts sentiment, as well as single basic emotions according to Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions, from the photo captions including hashtag terms. In doing so, an algorithm falling into the category of dictionary-based approaches to study emotions contained in written text was developed and applied. Not only are the overall polarity and the single emotions contained in Instagram posts within Vienna investigated, but also the top 54 Viennese Instagram locations. A particular novelty of this study is the measurement of longitudinal developments from emotive text and the fine-grained analysis of single emotions in addition to the overall polarity. One crucial empirical result of the study is that more experience and self-confidence in Instagram posting, as well as increasing expectations, seem to result in becoming a more critical poster over time. Companies interested in the use of influencer marketing to promote their products and services via Instagram should take this finding into consideration in order to be successful.