Investigating the components of the success in the creating and sharing of educational content on the Instagram based on the analysis of human information interaction

Users’ change approach from traditional methods to the use of social network sites, capacities for searching information and reaching ii including the educational content, have attracted the attention of numerous of studies in Human and Information Interaction. Also, availability, usability, audience attraction ability, and capacity of creating useful, customized and variable content have provided new opportunities in creating and distributing educational content on Instagram, one of the social media platforms that has the majority of the users in Iran. This study completed with mission of discovery and knowing the success components in creating and sharing educational content. The objectives of the study are analyzing successful experiences in producing and sharing information, drawing themes network of shared information, using of metadata for improving findability, and realizing factors affected in user acceptance in these pages

This research was carried out following qualitative research design with exploratory approach and thematic analysis. Thirty educational pages on Instagram have been selected based on competitive benchmarking, one of the research approaches in Information Architecture area. For research validity and reliability, the researchers used triangulation method. Data analyzed by Maxqda Pro 12.3 software. The research has done in the framework of Rosenfeld and Morville Information Architecture and in three dimensions: context, user and content. In the context dimension, the theory of use and gratification was used for examining the goals and motivations of information sharing. In the content dimension, the social tagging behavior was examined for investigating information findability behavior; also, the image characteristics have been examined the most liked posts, using theories of user engagement and optimal experience. In user dimension, the study investigated success components in content creating and successful content creators’ attributes. For this, the study analyzed user’s feedback in comments section and content creators and experts’ opinions.

The results showed that various components have contributed search optimization and findability. In context dimension, it showed that users had followed the goals of informing and awareness along with achieving economic goals, personal interest, interpersonal benefits, status, social status, and social interaction. In the content dimension and findability and examining the social tagging behavior, it was found that content creators had a definite constant policy on the use of hashtag. They had assigned subject and related hashtags, also they had used exclusive hashtags for the personalization and branding. They had utilized more subject, common and exclusive hashtags to content and less emphasizing and critical hashtags. The type of tags assigned to content was depended on the context of the pages. Also, the findings showed that 76 percent of the hashtags were consistent with the main subject of the shared content. Additionally, it was showed that image characteristics on the most liked posts were the human image, outstanding artistic, scientific and literary characters and nature and the themes of family, love, and religion on these posts. 80 percent of the most liked posts were dedicated to the main theme of the pages.  The components of the success of content acceptance by users included quality, awareness, credibility, value-added, specialized, motivational, entertaining, unique, relevant, realistic, up-to-date, and creative, executable, sharable, and personalized. Being committed, creativity, credibility, expertise, distinct identity, generosity and avoidance of copying, criticality, having intelligent behavior, patience and tolerate, a strong spirit of cooperation and communication, familiarity with analytical tools of information platform, and alignment with developments and updates were also components of the successful content creators.

The results of the research showed that successful experiments in three dimensions of context, content, and user, used specific features and components that could be a good model for content creators on this network. These components were using suitable inclusion of subject and exclusive hashtags; recommendation technique; information about author identity and expertise, contact information, valued followers, followers’ number, presence on other platforms, consistent themes in profile information; aesthetic, positive affect, quality, relevance, using of image characteristics, inspiring, Informing, realistic, relevance, unique, entertaining content and some others.