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Man, since the dawn of time has adapted, assimilated and survived in the world partly due to his incessant connectivity and kinship with other fellow beings. Aristotle had rightly opined that ‘man is a social animal’ and whether it was through letters in the past or with the current advancements in technology, we have come a long way in how we form and maintain relationships with those around us. In the past two decades, we have witnessed the myriad ways in which technology has successfully revolutionized connectivity chiefly through the incorporation of various social media platforms. This trend involves the technologies that are interactive and computer-mediated, allowing the users to create and share ideas, and information through various forms of expressions in these online communities. Although, social media is generally defined as any medium that allows individuals to connect and interact, this definition has been considered too broad as it would mean that forms of communication like television or telegraph are also to be considered social mediums. Across the world, the number of individuals that have incorporated social media in their lives has grown to nearly 3.5 billion at the outset of 2019, with a whopping 288 million new users.
The studies about Facebook have crossed millions whereas Instagram is slowly getting importance and is still an understudied topic (Salomon, 2013). Instagram, an American SNSs that was primarily focused on sharing photos and videos among its users, is currently owned by Facebook, Inc. Instagram was cleverly named as such to be short for instant telegram and it was launched in 2010 and had a surprisingly instantaneous growth and popularity. The main feature of the application is that it permits the users to upload videos and photos to it, these can be edited with the help of different filters, which are organized effectively using tags and particular location information (Hu et al., 2014). The posts from any account can be shared either publicly or with a private list of account holders or followers (Landsverk, 2014). The users of the platform can also browse the content of other users using the above-mentioned tags or location information while also having access to content that is trending or otherwise most viewed by people in a particular region on the platform as a whole. Users can furthermore show their support, acknowledgement or appreciation by 'liking' the photos and following other users to add their content to their particular and individualized feed. Concerning this existing scenario, this study investigates how psychological factors such as narcissism, self-esteem and perfectionistic self-presentation relate to Facebook and Instagram usage.