With a whopping 800 million active users every month, Instagram is not just a powerful social or marketing platform for businesses. It is in fact, an infinite ocean of data that can be used to extract insightful business intelligence, gain a deeper understanding of human behavior through their online activities with apps like instagram trackers, and much more.
With hundreds and millions of users scrolling through photos and videos, commenting, using hashtags, and interacting with others around the world, the power of this user-generated data is being harnessed by Instagram by employing technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Big Data.
Some of the most fascinating ways in which Instagram is using AI and Big Data today are-
- Fighting spam
To offer a spam-free experience to its users, Instagram uses AI to automatically detect fake messages and accounts. It uses DeepText, the AI algorithm of its parent company i.e. Facebook, which is designed to identify the perspective or context of any message almost as good as human beings. Instagram’s highly sophisticated spam filter can detect and take down fake messages sent by accounts that are written in nine different languages including Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and English.
- Search and explore page features
The use of hashtags helps Instagram identify trending topics or events, out of the millions of photos that are uploaded every day. This data along with Instagram search algorithms, enabled by hashtagging, helps users to navigate and find things of their interest. These advanced searching capabilities can also help them discover new things like new cafes, holiday spots, or experiences that they like.
- Enriching user experience
Instagram uses Machine Learning to sort data and understand what each user likes and employs algorithms to display posts in reverse-chronological sequence. As the amount of data grows enormous exponentially, Machine Learning algorithms can better analyze and learn with time, what is most valued by each user, so that Instagram can show them what they will like, and users find greater value from this platform.
- Target advertising
Through monitoring and analyzing the search preferences and engagement levels of users, Instagram extracts effective customer insights from the data that it collects. Based on these insights and empowered by the super-powerful data analytics network of Facebook, Instagram can help brands connect with the right customer profile. Essentially, Instagram facilitates target advertising based on users’ likes, whom they follow, interact with, and what posts they save.
- Preventing cyberbullying
Instagram became the world’s first social media platform to adopt Machine Learning to remove offensive posts automatically. Comments that violate Instagram’s Community Guidelines are detected by the DeepText algorithm and removed immediately. Human users of Instagram helped DeepText to identify offensive content by tagging posts, and so far this algorithm has received a significant commendation for its effectiveness.
Final words
Instagram has also used Machine Learning to analyze 100 million photos to reveal global attire patterns to aid a study. The potential of ground-breaking technologies like automated analytics algorithms, machine learning, and computer vision was successfully displayed in extracting insights from seemingly impossible sizes of datasets.
