earticle

영어

The advent of location-based social networks (LBSNs), and the pervasive use of smartphones have allowed individuals to easily inform their status through locational information. This led to a new trend in social media: to upload geotagged photos that illustrate the location of the images and then share them with others. In this circumstance, the current study aims to examine the use of geotags on Instagram. Further, the motivations for using geotags as well as the relationship among the motivation, satisfaction, and location information sharing behavior are analyzed. The online survey was conducted on 411 respondents of Hong Kong who are active Instagram users. Based on uses and gratification theory and goal theory, the users’ motivations and goals for utilizing geotags were divided into mainly two categories; task-involved and self-involved goals. Then, four different motivations (contribution, memory aid, showing off, and reputation gaining) were further examined. The result indicated that contribution, memory aid, and reputation gaining were the goals and motivation for the users to utilize geotags on Instagram, having a positive impact on satisfaction. However, a positive relationship between showing off and geotag satisfaction was not supported. Among four different factors, memory aid was found to have the strongest influence on geotagging satisfaction. The result of testing the relationship between geotag satisfaction and further location information sharing behavior also turned out to have a positive relationship. The implications and limitations of findings are also discussed in the study.