In 2021, there were 1.21 billion monthly active users of Meta's Instagram, making up over 28 percent of the world's internet users. By 2025, it has been forecast that there will be 1.44 billion monthly active users of the social media platform, which would account for 31.2 percent of global internet users.

How popular is Instagram?

Instagram, as of January 2022, was the fourth most popular social media platform in the world in terms of user numbers. YouTube and WhatsApp ranked in second and third place, respectively, whilst Facebook remained the most popular, with almost three billion monthly active users worldwide.

India had the largest number of Instagram users as of January 2022, with a total of over 230 million users in the country. The second-largest Instagram audience could be found in the United States, with almost 160 million people subscribing to the photo and video sharing app.

Gen Z and Instagram

As of September 2021, Gen Z users in the United States spent an average of five hours per week on Instagram. Although Instagram ranked third in terms of hours per week spent on the platform, Gen Z users spent considerably more time on TikTok, amounting to a weekly average of over 10 hours being spent on the mobile-first video app.

Most followed accounts on Instagram

As of May 2022, Instagram’s own account had 504.37 million followers. In terms of celebrities, Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (@chistiano) had over 440.41 million followers on the social network. Moreover, the average media value of an Instagram post by Ronaldo was over 985,000 U.S. dollars.

The most liked post on Instagram as of May 2022 was Photo of an Egg, which was posted in 2019 by the account @world_record_egg. Photo of an Egg has not only exceeded 55 million likes on the platform, but it also has nearly 3.5 million comments, and the account itself has over 4.5 million Instagram followers. After mysterious posts published by the account, World Record Egg revealed itself as part of a mental health campaign aimed at the difficulties and demands of using social media.

Access detailed insights with our Instagram datasets, featuring follower counts, verified status, account types, and engagement scores. Explore post information including URLs, descriptions, hashtags, comments, likes, media, posting dates, locations, and reel URLs. Perfect for understanding user engagement and content trends to drive informed decisions and optimize your social media strategies. Over 750M records available Price starts at $250/100K records Data formats are available in JSON, NDJSON, CSV, XLSX and Parquet. 100% ethical and compliant data collection Included datapoints:

Account Fbid Id Followers Posts Count Is Business Account Is Professional Account Is Verified Avg Engagement External Url Biography Business Category Name Category Name Post Hashtags Following Posts Profile Image Link Profile URL Profile Name Highlights Count Highlights Full Name Is Private Bio Hashtags URL Is Joined Recently And much more

Cristiano Ronaldo has one of the most popular Instagram accounts as of April 2024.

              The Portuguese footballer is the most-followed person on the photo sharing app platform with 628 million followers. Instagram's own account was ranked first with roughly 672 million followers.

              How popular is Instagram?

              Instagram is a photo-sharing social networking service that enables users to take pictures and edit them with filters. The platform allows users to post and share their images online and directly with their friends and followers on the social network. The cross-platform app reached one billion monthly active users in mid-2018. In 2020, there were over 114 million Instagram users in the United States and experts project this figure to surpass 127 million users in 2023.

              Who uses Instagram?

              Instagram audiences are predominantly young – recent data states that almost 60 percent of U.S. Instagram users are aged 34 years or younger. Fall 2020 data reveals that Instagram is also one of the most popular social media for teens and one of the social networks with the biggest reach among teens in the United States.

              Celebrity influencers on Instagram
              Many celebrities and athletes are brand spokespeople and generate additional income with social media advertising and sponsored content. Unsurprisingly, Ronaldo ranked first again, as the average media value of one of his Instagram posts was 985,441 U.S. dollars.

As of April 2025, almost 32 percent of global Instagram audiences were aged between 25 and 34 years, and 29.5 percent of users were aged between 25 and 34 years. Overall, 16.3 percent of users belonged to the 35 to 44 year age group. Instagram users With roughly one billion monthly active users, Instagram belongs to the most popular social networks worldwide. The social photo sharing app is especially popular in India and in the United States, which have respectively 413.85 million and 171.7 million Instagram users each. Instagram features One of the most popular features of Instagram is Stories. Users can post photos and videos to their Stories stream and the content is live for others to view for 24 hours before it disappears. In January 2019, the company reported that there were 500 million daily active Instagram Stories users. Instagram Stories directly competes with Snapchat, another photo sharing app that initially became famous due to it’s “vanishing photos” feature. As of the first quarter of 2025, Snapchat had 460 million daily active users.

These four datasets are gathered from Instagram users who were chosen randomly.

The MainDataset encompasses data for 818 users. The TestDataset encompasses data for 78 users.

Data gathered for each user includes :

1- number of posts

2- number of followers

3- number of followings

4- number of likes for the tenth previous post

5- number of likes for the eleventh previous post

6- number of likes for the twelfth previous post

7- number of self-presenting posts from nine previous posts

8- gender

The MainDataset_after_150_days and TestDataset_after_150_days encompass data of the users of the Main data set and the Test data set, respectively, for after 150 days. For example, User_1 in the MainDataset has 486 posts and in the MainDataset_after_150_days has 562 posts, which means over the course of 150 days he had published 76 posts.

Instagram data-download example dataset

In this repository you can find a data-set consisting of 11 personal Instagram archives, or Data-Download Packages (DDPs).

How the data was generated

These Instagram accounts were all new and generated by a group of researchers who were interested to figure out in detail the structure and variety in structure of these Instagram DDPs. The participants user the Instagram account extensively for approximately a week. The participants also intensively communicated with each other so that the data can be used as an example of a network.

The data was primarily generated to evaluate the performance of de-identification software. Therefore, the text in the DDPs particularly contain many randomly chosen (Dutch) first names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and URLS. In addition, the images in the DDPs contain many faces and text as well. The DDPs contain faces and text (usernames) of third parties. However, only content of so-called `professional accounts' are shared, such as accounts of famous individuals or institutions who self-consciously and actively seek publicity, and these sources are easily publicly available. Furthermore, the DDPs do not contain sensitive personal data of these individuals.

Obtaining your Instagram DDP

After using the Instagram accounts intensively for approximately a week, the participants requested their personal Instagram DDPs by using the following steps. You can follow these steps yourself if you are interested in your personal Instagram DDP.

1. Go to www.instagram.com and log in
2. Click on your profile picture, go to Settings and Privacy and Security
3. Scroll to Data download and click Request download
4. Enter your email adress and click Next
5. Enter your password and click Request download

Instagram then delivered the data in a compressed zip folder with the format username_YYYYMMDD.zip (i.e., Instagram handle and date of download) to the participant, and the participants shared these DDPs with us.

Data cleaning

To comply with the Instagram user agreement, participants shared their full name, phone number and e-mail address. In addition, Instagram logged the i.p. addresses the participant used during their active period on Instagram. After colleting the DDPs, we manually replaced such information with random replacements such that the DDps shared here do not contain any personal data of the participants.

How this data-set can be used

This data-set was generated with the intention to evaluate the performance of the de-identification software. We invite other researchers to use this data-set for example to investigate what type of data can be found in Instagram DDPs or to investigate the structure of Instagram DDPs. The packages can also be used for example data-analyses, although no substantive research questions can be answered using this data as the data does not reflect how research subjects behave `in the wild'.

Authors

The data collection is executed by Laura Boeschoten, Ruben van den Goorbergh and Daniel Oberski of Utrecht University. For questions, please contact l.boeschoten@uu.nl.

Acknowledgments

The researchers would like to thank everyone who participated in this data-generation project.

Gain valuable insights with our comprehensive Social Media Dataset, designed to help businesses, marketers, and analysts track trends, monitor engagement, and optimize strategies. This dataset provides structured and reliable social media data from multiple platforms.

Dataset Features

User Profiles: Access public social media profiles, including usernames, bios, follower counts, engagement metrics, and more. Ideal for audience analysis, influencer marketing, and competitive research. Posts & Content: Extract posts, captions, hashtags, media (images/videos), timestamps, and engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments. Useful for trend analysis, sentiment tracking, and content strategy optimization. Comments & Interactions: Analyze user interactions, including replies, mentions, and discussions. This data helps brands understand audience sentiment and engagement patterns. Hashtag & Trend Tracking: Monitor trending hashtags, topics, and viral content across platforms to stay ahead of industry trends and consumer interests.

Customizable Subsets for Specific Needs Our Social Media Dataset is fully customizable, allowing you to filter data based on platform, region, keywords, engagement levels, or specific user profiles. Whether you need a broad dataset for market research or a focused subset for brand monitoring, we tailor the dataset to your needs.

Popular Use Cases

Brand Monitoring & Reputation Management: Track brand mentions, customer feedback, and sentiment analysis to manage online reputation effectively. Influencer Marketing & Audience Analysis: Identify key influencers, analyze engagement metrics, and optimize influencer partnerships. Competitive Intelligence: Monitor competitor activity, content performance, and audience engagement to refine marketing strategies. Market Research & Consumer Insights: Analyze social media trends, customer preferences, and emerging topics to inform business decisions. AI & Predictive Analytics: Leverage structured social media data for AI-driven trend forecasting, sentiment analysis, and automated content recommendations.

Whether you're tracking brand sentiment, analyzing audience engagement, or monitoring industry trends, our Social Media Dataset provides the structured data you need. Get started today and customize your dataset to fit your business objectives.

Kindly refer to my paper for more information. Please cite my work if you use my dataset in any work : K. R. Purba, D. Asirvatham and R. K. Murugesan, "Classification of instagram fake users using supervised machine learning algorithms," International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE), vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 2763-2772, 2020.

The dataset was collected using web scraping from third-party Instagram websites, to capture their metadata and up to 12 latest media posts from each user. The collection process was executed from September 1st, 2019, until September 20th, 2019. The dataset contains authentic users and fake users, which were filtered using human annotators. The authentic users were taken from followers of 24 private university pages (8 Indonesian, 8 Malaysian, 8 Australian) on Instagram. To reduce the number of users, they are picked using proportional random sampling based on their source university. All private users were removed, which is a total of 31,335 out of 63,795 users (49.11%). The final number of public users used in this research was 32,460 users.

Var name | Feature name | Description pos | Num posts | Number of total posts that the user has ever posted. flg | Num following | Number of following flr | Num followers | Number of followers bl | Biography length | Length (number of characters) of the user's biography pic | Picture availability | Value 0 if the user has no profile picture, or 1 if has lin | Link availability | Value 0 if the user has no external URL, or 1 if has cl | Average caption length | The average number of character of captions in media cz | Caption zero | Percentage (0.0 to 1.0) of captions that has almost zero (<=3) length ni | Non image percentage | Percentage (0.0 to 1.0) of non-image media. There are three types of media on an Instagram post, i.e. image, video, carousel erl | Engagement rate (Like) | Engagement rate (ER) is commonly defined as (num likes) divide by (num media) divide by (num followers) erc | Engagement rate (Comm.) | Similar to ER like, but it is for comments lt | Location tag percentage | Percentage (0.0 to 1.0) of posts tagged with location hc | Average hashtag count | Average number of hashtags used in a post pr | Promotional keywords | Average use of promotional keywords in hashtag, i.e. {regrann, contest, repost, giveaway, mention, share, give away, quiz} fo | Followers keywords | Average use of followers hunter keywords in hashtag, i.e. {follow, like, folback, follback, f4f} cs | Cosine similarity | Average cosine similarity of between all pair of two posts a user has pi | Post interval | Average interval between posts (in hours)

Output : 2-class User classes : r (real/authentic user), f (fake user / bought followers) 4-class User classes : r (authentic/real user), a (active fake user), i (inactive fake user), s (spammer fake user) Note that the 3 fake user classes (a, i, s) were judged by human annotators.

These two data sets are gathered from Instagram users who were chosen randomly.

The Main data set encompasses data for 1K users including 500 men and 500 women. The Test data set encompasses data for 100 users including 50 men and 50 women.

Data gathered for each user includes :

1- number of posts

2- number of followers

3- number of followings

4- number of likes for the tenth previous post

5- number of likes for the eleventh previous post

6- number of likes for the twelfth previous post

7- number of self-presenting posts from nine previous posts

8- gender

As of April 2024, around 16.5 percent of global active Instagram users were men between the ages of 18 and 24 years. More than half of the global Instagram population worldwide was aged 34 years or younger.

              Teens and social media

              As one of the biggest social networks worldwide, Instagram is especially popular with teenagers. As of fall 2020, the photo-sharing app ranked third in terms of preferred social network among teenagers in the United States, second to Snapchat and TikTok. Instagram was one of the most influential advertising channels among female Gen Z users when making purchasing decisions. Teens report feeling more confident, popular, and better about themselves when using social media, and less lonely, depressed and anxious.
              Social media can have negative effects on teens, which is also much more pronounced on those with low emotional well-being. It was found that 35 percent of teenagers with low social-emotional well-being reported to have experienced cyber bullying when using social media, while in comparison only five percent of teenagers with high social-emotional well-being stated the same. As such, social media can have a big impact on already fragile states of mind.

1) Data Introduction • The Social Media Usage Dataset(Applications) features patterns and activity indicators that 1,000 users use seven major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

2) Data Utilization (1) Social Media Usage Dataset(Applications) has characteristics that: • This dataset provides different social media activity data for each user, including daily usage time, number of posts, number of likes received, and number of new followers. (2) Social Media Usage Dataset(Applications) can be used to: • Analysis of User Participation by Platform: You can analyze participation and popular trends by platform by comparing usage time and activity for each social media. • Establish marketing strategy: Based on user activity data, it can be used for targeted marketing, content production, and user retention strategies.

This dataset supports research on how engagement with social media (Instagram and TikTok) was related to problematic social media use (PSMU) and mental well-being. There are three different files. The SPSS and Excel spreadsheet files include the same dataset but in a different format. The SPSS output presents the data analysis in regard to the difference between Instagram and TikTok users.

Context: This dataset offers insights into the usage patterns of social media apps for 1,000 users across seven popular platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It tracks various metrics such as daily time spent on the app, number of posts made, likes received, and new followers gained.

Dataset Features:

User_ID: Unique identifier for each user. App: The social media platform being used. Daily_Minutes_Spent: Total time a user spends on the app each day, ranging from 5 to 500 minutes. Posts_Per_Day: Number of posts a user creates per day, ranging from 0 to 20. Likes_Per_Day: Total number of likes a user receives on their posts each day, ranging from 0 to 200. Follows_Per_Day: The number of new followers a user gains daily, ranging from 0 to 50. Context & Use Cases: This dataset could be particularly useful for social media analysts, digital marketers, or researchers interested in understanding user engagement trends across different platforms. It provides insights into how much time users spend, how actively they post, and the level of engagement they receive (in terms of likes and followers).

Conclusion & Outcome: Analyzing this dataset could yield several outcomes:

Engagement Patterns: Identifying which platforms have higher engagement in terms of time spent or likes received. Active Users: Determining which users are the most active across various platforms based on the number of posts and followers gained. User Retention: Studying the correlation between time spent and follower growth, providing insight into user retention strategies for different platforms. Overall, the dataset allows for exploration of social media usage trends and helps drive decision-making for marketing strategies, content creation, and platform engagement.

Explore the short-form video landscape on Instagram with this specialized dataset featuring Reels content. This collection includes millions of Reels posts from global creators, influencers, and brands, providing a focused view into one of Instagram’s fastest-growing content formats.

Key Features:

🎥 Reel-Specific Posts: Every entry in the dataset is confirmed to be an Instagram Reel, with associated metadata.

📊 Content & Engagement Metrics: Includes video captions, hashtags, view counts, like counts, comment counts, share counts, and timestamp data.

👤 Creator Information: Features public account data such as usernames, follower counts, bio snippets, and account category where available.

📈 Trend Discovery & Analysis: Perfect for analyzing video content performance, audio trends, visual themes, and influencer strategies on Reels.

🎯 Ready for Analysis: Delivered in clean CSV format, API, or custom formats, optimized for direct use in analytics, dashboards, machine learning models, or campaign planning.

This dataset is ideal for marketers, social strategists, and researchers looking to understand what drives engagement in short-form video content across the Instagram ecosystem.

As of January 2024, Instagram was slightly more popular with men than women, with men accounting for 50.6 percent of the platform’s global users. Additionally, the social media app was most popular amongst younger audiences, with almost 32 percent of users aged between 18 and 24 years.

              Instagram’s Global Audience

              As of January 2024, Instagram was the fourth most popular social media platform globally, reaching two billion monthly active users (MAU). This number is projected to keep growing with no signs of slowing down, which is not a surprise as the global online social penetration rate across all regions is constantly increasing.
              As of January 2024, the country with the largest Instagram audience was India with 362.9 million users, followed by the United States with 169.7 million users.

              Who is winning over the generations?

              Even though Instagram’s audience is almost twice the size of TikTok’s on a global scale, TikTok has shown itself to be a fierce competitor, particularly amongst younger audiences. TikTok was the most downloaded mobile app globally in 2022, generating 672 million downloads. As of 2022, Generation Z in the United States spent more time on TikTok than on Instagram monthly.

Automatically describing images using natural sentences is an essential task to visually impaired people's inclusion on the Internet. Although there are many datasets in the literature, most of them contain only English captions, whereas datasets with captions described in other languages are scarce.

PraCegoVer arose on the Internet, stimulating users from social media to publish images, tag #PraCegoVer and add a short description of their content. Inspired by this movement, we have proposed the #PraCegoVer, a multi-modal dataset with Portuguese captions based on posts from Instagram. It is the first large dataset for image captioning in Portuguese with freely annotated images.

PraCegoVer has 533,523 pairs with images and captions described in Portuguese collected from more than 14 thousand different profiles. Also, the average caption length in #PraCegoVer is 39.3 words and the standard deviation is 29.7.

Dataset Structure

PraCegoVer dataset is composed of the main file dataset.json and a collection of compressed files named images.tar.gz.partX

containing the images. The file dataset.json comprehends a list of json objects with the attributes:

user: anonymized user that made the post;

filename: image file name;

raw_caption: raw caption;

caption: clean caption;

date: post date.

Each instance in dataset.json is associated with exactly one image in the images directory whose filename is pointed by the attribute filename. Also, we provide a sample with five instances, so the users can download the sample to get an overview of the dataset before downloading it completely.

Download Instructions

If you just want to have an overview of the dataset structure, you can download sample.tar.gz. But, if you want to use the dataset, or any of its subsets (63k and 173k), you must download all the files and run the following commands to uncompress and join the files:

cat images.tar.gz.part* > images.tar.gz tar -xzvf images.tar.gz

Alternatively, you can download the entire dataset from the terminal using the python script download_dataset.py available in PraCegoVer repository. In this case, first, you have to download the script and create an access token here. Then, you can run the following command to download and uncompress the image files:

python download_dataset.py --access_token=

Through social media like Instagram, users are constantly exposed to “perfect” lives and bodies. Research in this field has predominantly focused on the mere time youth spend on Instagram and the effects on their body image, oftentimes uncovering negative effects. Little research has been done on the root of the influence: the consumed content itself. Hence, this study aims to qualitatively uncover the types of content that trigger youths’ body image. Using a diary study, 28 youth (Mage = 21.86; 79% female) reported 140 influential body image Instagram posts over five days, uncovering trigger points and providing their motivations, emotions, and impacts on body image. Based on these posts, four content categories were distinguished: Thin Ideal, Body Positivity, Fitness, and Lifestyle. These different content types triggered different emotions regarding body image, and clear gender distinctions in content could be noticed. The study increased youths’ awareness of Instagram's influence on their mood and body perception. The findings imply that the discussion about the effects of social media on body image should be nuanced, taking into account different types of content and users. Using this information, future interventions could focus on conscious use of social media rather than merely limiting its use. Date Submitted: 2023-08-20

This dataset includes Instagram user characteristics of those Olympic athletes who won gold medals in the individual events of Rio2016. The name of all these gold medalists of individual events are in the dataset (226 athletes), however only 144 athletes (83 men and 61 women) had a publicly available Instagram account in all of the observations during the 4 months period of data gathering. The first round of data gathering (first observation, i.e. OlympicAthletesData_1) took place 9-Aug-2019 to 12-Aug-2019, the second round of data gathering (second observation, i.e. OlympicAthletesData_2) took place 9-Sep-2019 to 12-Sep-2019, the third round of data gathering (third observation, i.e. OlympicAthletesData_3) took place 9-Oct-2019 to 12-Oct-2019, the fourth round of data gathering (fourth observation, i.e. OlympicAthletesData_4) took place 9-Nov-2019 to 12-Nov-2019. The data gathered for each user (in each observation) consists of:

1- Name of the individual event

2- Country

3- Name

4- Gender

5- Instagram ID

6- Number of Posts

7- Number of followers

8- Number of followings

9- Maximum Number of likes (in the last 10 photo posts)

10- Number of comments for the post with Maximum Number of likes (in the last 10 photo posts)

11- Number of self-presenting posts in the last 10 photo posts (those posts in which the athlete is present)

12- Number of pure self-presenting posts in the last 10 photo posts (those posts in which the athlete is the only person who is present)

13- Age

14- Date of data crawling

The number of Instagram users ranking is led by India with ****** million users, while the United States is following with ****** million users. In contrast, Seychelles is at the bottom of the ranking with **** million users, showing a difference of ****** million users to India. User figures, shown here with regards to the platform instagram, have been estimated by taking into account company filings or press material, secondary research, app downloads and traffic data. They refer to the average monthly active users over the period and count multiple accounts by persons only once.The shown data are an excerpt of Statista's Key Market Indicators (KMI). The KMI are a collection of primary and secondary indicators on the macro-economic, demographic and technological environment in up to *** countries and regions worldwide. All indicators are sourced from international and national statistical offices, trade associations and the trade press and they are processed to generate comparable data sets (see supplementary notes under details for more information).

This dataset investigates the Instagram engagement metrics (likes and comments) of the U.S. and British Armies to understand their strengths and weaknesses in their marketing. For the quantitative data collection, a random number generator was used to compile a 20% data sample (73 posts) from a total of 365 posts from each account. For instance, a number 1 in the random generator corresponded to the most recent post from the start date of data collection (May 23rd, 2024). By picking from 365 posts, the data collection was meant to represent roughly a year of Instagram content, assuming their Instagram accounts posted every day. This method ensured an unbiased representation of which content was included in the 20% data sample.However, the U.S Army posted almost once a day while the British Army posted only a few days a week. In the end, data was collected across 365 U.S. Army posts from May 23rd, 2024, to October 28th, 2023. For the British Army’s Instagram, the data collection span from May 23rd, 2024, to November 25th, 2021. By engaging with recent posts, the purpose was to understand how effectively these Armies responded to their recruitment crisis (which started in 2022).For the data collection, variables for each post included the following:Date of postNumber of likesPercentage of likes by follower populationNumber of commentsPercentage of comments by follower populationTo understand which Instagram posts were successful, the content with the highest number of likes and comments were defined as the most engaged. But, to accurately compare the British Army’s Instagram engagement to the U.S., the number of likes/comments was divided by the number of their followers. As of May 23, 2024, the U.S. Army had 2.9 million followers on Instagram whereas the British Army had 594,000 followers. While social media users outside of the Armies’ followers engaged with the posts, these ratios provided a basis to fairly compare their engagement metrics.