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nap, tag, share, repeat. That seems to be what Jakartans like to do on Instagram, making the capital the most popular city on the social media platform.

Jakarta offers many things worth sharing on social media. That is what 28-year-old Sudirman Napitupulu believes. The civil servant likes to post food shots and new hangout places he goes to on the weekends through his favorite platform Instagram Stories. Location tag: Jakarta.

“I like sharing my activities. I also want to inform my followers about the new things I try in case they also want to give it a go,” he told The Jakarta Post on Monday.

Introduced last year, Stories is a feature on Instagram that allows users to share moments through photos and short 15-second videos on their account. Unlike photos posted on the timeline, anything put on Stories will only last for 24 hours.

Sudirman shares photos from karaoke sessions and the hottest new restaurants in town to performances of belly dancers.

“Some people maybe think that sharing moments is show off, but I never think about that while sharing, it’s just spontaneous,” he said.

But the feature is not only for fun and games, according to 20-year-old Nidya Glory.

The Jakarta Tourism Academy student said she sometimes shares videos and photos of worsening traffic congestion from various ongoing construction projects during her travels from her home in Kelapa Gading in North Jakarta to her campus in Central Jakarta.

With a hashtag asking when the project will be completed, she also tags Jakarta as the location.

“With Instagram Stories, I can shoot videos of everyone’s face and expression and the entire situation of the place where I am,” she said.

The visual-sharing segment celebrated its first anniversary on Aug. 2 and people like Nidya and Sudirman helped made Jakarta top the list of the most-tagged location on the social media platform. Following Jakarta, the next most popular location tags among Instagram users on Stories were Sao Paulo in Brazil, New York in the United States, London in the United Kingdom and Madrid in Spain. Since its launch last year, Stories, which has 250 million daily users, has also boosted the amount of time users spend on the app, according to a statement from Instagram. Given that Jakarta is the most tagged location on Instagram Stories, this is not so surprising.

“For the people of Indonesia, sharing important moments is part of the culture, so it is no wonder Indonesians have become the largest Instagram Stories content producers, as most Indonesian users upload on average twice as many Stories globally,” Sri Widowati, Facebook Indonesia country director, the company which oversees Instagram, said recently.

Indonesia has 45 million active users per month, making the country the biggest market for Instagram in the Asia Pacific.

The number of users more than doubled from 22 million recorded in early 2016. By the end of the first quarter of 2017, Indonesia accounted for over 6 percent of Instagram’s 700 million monthly active users.

Power blogger and social media observer Enda Nasution said amid the surge in Instagram’s popularity, Indonesians, especially those who lived in big cities like Jakarta, were more socially conscious and loved to show off their social status. The love for the Stories feature might stem from the fact that the segment supports the characteristics of urban people.

“Jakartans love to show others where they hang out without feeling guilty of being show offs,” he said. (dra)
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Liza Yosephine contributed to this story