While Instagram, the rising photo-sharing social networking service, has received increasing attention from scholars and practitioners, little is known about the social and psychological factors that lead consumers to become fanatics of this app. To provide a baseline understanding of Instagram users, the current study aims to uncover the structural dimensions of consumers' motives for using Instagram and to explore the relationships between identified motivations and key attitudinal and behavioral intention variables. A comprehensive survey was developed in which a total of 212 Instagram users evaluated their motivation, primary activities, use intention, and attitude regarding Instagram. The results suggest that Instagram users have five primary social and psychological motives: social interaction, archiving, self-expression, escapism, and peeking. The implications of this study's findings are discussed.

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This paper investigates whether online social contexts can prime individuals to create avatars that emphasize particular characteristics and personality traits that are different from their actual selves. The results show that while the participants’ avatar personality ratings are correlated with their own personality ratings across the Big-Five personality dimensions, they still try to express personality characteristics that are somewhat different from their actual selves in virtual environment. Further, with respect to the relationship between avatar personality ratings (given by creators) and those by zero-acquaintances, no significant relationships were observed (with the exception of the Agreeableness dimension).