Instagram data visualisation

In this post I visualize GPS data collected from Instagram social network. I collected the data during the Easter 2016 from Switzerland area. I chose the time frame from 24/03/2016 through 30/03/2016 – the time of vacations, traveling and increasing user activity on Instagram.

These visualizations help to unveil the most popular leisure and vacation destinations in Switzerland. You will see how many people from different countries visit Switzerland during Easter. Finally, you will get an idea of how people plan their routes when travel to Switzerland for a vacation.

All these insights were gained by looking at the publicly available GPS data shared by Instagram users. Perhaps, Instagram GPS data visualization is the most interesting and insightful way to explore users and tourists behavior.

The process of data collection from Instagram is described in my previous blog post.

First, I plotted all the posts on map. You can already see the most popular places in Switzerland based on the number of photos posted on Instagram during Easter.

Afterwards, I was interested in users who visited Switzerland as tourists. A month later I collected recent Instagram posts of the users from the initial dataset, and removed locations that belong to Switzerland area. This allowed to represent a group of users who potentially could be tourists.

Heat maps are good for representation of overall trends, however it would be interesting to have precise numbers of tourists from all locations. Below you can see the number of Instagram users who visited Switzerland during Easter, visualized on the map.

Then, I was interested in the most popular routes that tourists choose coming to Switzerland. It turns out that routes that users choose (according to Instagram locations) are not optimal and quite interesting.

After that, I extracted all hashtags from all locations, removed city names and most popular tags from the dataset. Then, I plotted all the data as labels on the map. Click here to see how the map visualization of most popular Instagram hashtags looks like. It gives an idea why people go to certain places - people are skiing, snowboarding, visiting events, enjoying nature or just having fun. It is great to see that some parts of the country are just completely covered with a hashtag “love”.

Lastly, I plotted animated tourist flow based on the locations extracted from the recent posts. Follow this link or click on the image below in order to see the animated map of tourists flow coming in and out of the country.

Animated tourists flow