In its recently released 2017 annual report, Instagram has revealed how people in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates prefer presenting themselves to the world. In both countries, it seems that, instead of immediately opting for a filter, the first choice for most people is to keep their pictures as is.
When they have to choose a filter, people in the UAE love Clarendon, Gingham, Juno and Lark to enhance their images, and the top 10 filters looked very similar for Saudi Arabia, except the Hefe and Nashville filters featured instead of Amaro and Lo-fi in the UAE worldwide, the five most-used filters of 2017 were Clarendon, Gingham, Juno, Lark, and Moon).
PopSugar.com points out that the report does not “factor in whether people have simply used another app to edit their photographs but they findings still say a lot about the country's Instagram habits.”
According to Social Media Today, the report also features Instagram’s “annual listing of key usage trends, which includes a range of stats from throughout the year. The insights provided are mostly 'of interest', as opposed to deep analysis, but still, using this data, you can get a better perspective on what’s popular on the platform, and which users are driving the most engagement.”
The report also listed the top 10 most popular hashtags of the year on Instagram, with #love once again coming out on top, followed by #fashion, #photooftheday, #photography, #art, #beautiful, #travel, and #happy.
Instagram has been experiencing rapid growth over the last few years, reaching 800 million active monthly users earlier this year, with 63 million in the MENA region. It still has a long way to catch up to Facebook’s audience of 2 billion and WhatsApp 1.3 billion monthly active users.
