How are college students using Instagram? And what do they consider to be acceptable behavior on the social network? Those were two of the questions I set out to answer in a survey I did with my digital media strategies students at Drake University during the first day of class this week.
The class is made up mostly of first- and second-year communications students. There are some older students, and some non-communications majors in the class as well.
The first two questions were how often do they post to Instagram and how often do they consider it acceptable to post to Instagram. You can see that they find it acceptable to post weekly or even twice per week, but few of them actually do post that often.
Next I asked the same question specifically about Instagram Stories. They’re posting here more often, and they consider it acceptable to post more often. But again, they’re not making as much content as they are OK with seeing.
I next had them look at how much time they spend per day on Instagram.
And then what they post about on Instagram.
What they post about specifically on Instagram Stories.
Finally, I asked them to rate some social networks. TikTok made a surprising leap from it’s score of 2.1 in last semester’s survey.
Here’s a breakdown of TikTok last semester compared to this semester.
For comparison, you can see the results of the same survey in January of last year (this one did not include TikTok) here.