In a year of high profile weddings, it’s Anushka Sharma and Virat Kohli who have emerged victorious on Instagram. Their selfies with each other as posted on their respective accounts were the two most liked photos of 2018.
Mr. Kohli feeding a birthday cake to Ms. Sharma under the caption “Happy B’day my love” garnered over 36 lakh likes, making it the most popular in the country this year.
Cricketer M.S. Dhoni’s photo, holding a trophy with his wife and child, was the third most liked photo, followed by Akshay Kumar’s selfie with Suniel Shetty and Jacqueline Fernandez’s photo with American actor and Instagram celebrity Amanda Cerny.
With the #MeToo movement creating ripples in India in the last three months, Instagram reported that the hashtag #metoo was used 1.5 million times on the social media website, making it the top advocacy hashtag of the year. It was followed by #timesup and #marchforourlives, which were used 5,97,000 and 5,62,000 times respectively.
Instagram continued to be the Internet’s happy place in 2018 as well with the heart emoji being used in comments 14 billion times. Hearts in the form of emoji, face filter and sticker were the most used on the website. #love was the most popular hashtag in India followed by #instagood and #fashion, while #lovequotes saw the highest growth.
Happiest location
Disneyland Tokyo emerged as the happiest geotagged location in the world, which saw the highest use of the heart emoji in the caption.
K-pop dominated Instagram globally as the South Korean boy band BTS was the top fandom community on the website.