The home of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster has grabbed the attention of Instagram, after it spotted a ‘wave of activity’ on its social network.
Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle featured on the blog of the Facebook-owned photo sharing service yesterday (3 July 2013) and got over 1500 ‘likes’ in 24 hours.
The blog captures the visual trends of its users by linking together the things they are snapping every day.
In the past week, it has featured the Tour de France, political protests in Egypt, the Obamas’ tour of Africa and the Palio di Siena Horse Race in Italy.
Most recently (at the time of writing), it documented the coup of Egypt’s President in pictures. But yesterday, it featured the ageless attraction of the Loch Ness Monster and the beautiful landscape around it. It appears the daily blog simply monitors its network for ‘hot’, or ‘trending’ topics. With the likes of the Tour de France, Egypt and the Palio horse race, these are events which will trend organically as they happen, so it’s great to see a local landmark featured on Instagram for no other reason than its popularity amongst the Instagram community
Loch Ness is unlikely to suddenly start trending like an event, unless of course there is a sighting, which is definitely worth sharing on any social network. So keep those cameras at the ready!
Instagram’s hashtag network
Instagram uses ‘hashtags’ to link subjects of common interest amongst users who would otherwise never know each other. Hashtags are words which describe the subject matter preceded by a ‘hash’ – #. The network then links all the pictures together using the term.
Instagram relies heavily on hashtags to connect users because of its visual nature. Twitter made them popular and Facebook has recently introduced them. Facebook famously bought Instagram earlier in 2013 for $1 billion.
