Instagram Will Tell You Who is The Next Top Model

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but also in popularity on social media apparently, as Instagram will tell you who is the next top model due to the efforts of researchers who have brought the job of agents down to a near science.

There is little doubt now that the internet is beginning to have a say in quite a few industries. Opinions are conflicting if they should. On one hand, they are the market, the consumers to which companies want to appeal. On the other, most of them have no professional training or know what to accurately look for in every domain they pitch in.

And, most would likely know by now if they ever browsed enough through forums, comment sections or social media, everyone on the internet is an expert on everything.

Ahead of Fashion Week, researchers at Indiana University have designed an algorithm that reported an 80% accuracy in predicting who the next top model will be. The main resource of their study? Instagram.

In order to determine which model out of the 431 female models within the Fashion Model Directory will be walking down the runway and getting a new contract, researchers have gathered data by narrowing it down to just 15 new faces and going through their Instagram accounts.

Several factors were taken into consideration, such as the number of runways they had appeared on in the past, number of likes, posts, comments, followers, representation and, of course, appearance.

In lieu of their study, they were able to accurately predict which young women will be featured as Fashion Week’s successful models, and 6 out of 8 picks were in fact true as the most popular. They were also able to accurately tell who would be on the unfortunate end of the scale, predicting 6 out of the 7 guesses who would be the least successful.

According to Emilion Ferrara, a computer scientist who participated in the study, being more active on Instagram increased their chances. In fact, bigger numbers of posts and comments could offer up to 15% better chances of getting that new contact. Whether they were represented by a top agency or not also played a part, though that is perhaps a clearer tool to use.

Being represented by a top agency increased their chances 10 times over, and only 24% of the new faces were given the chance to walk down the runway in comparison to the established models.

However, Instagram played its part. Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, who contributed to the study, has stated  that social media is now becoming a way for models to interact with the public, which offers them an insight on their prospective careers, such as popularity. Interestingly enough though, too much was not beneficial.

Researchers have found that models with far more ‘likes’ than the average had 10% less chances of appearing on the runway. So, too much is bad, too little is also bad, so future models need just the right amount of popularity on social media.

Image source: theindustry.cc