Social media has become the place for everyone to show off the best version of themselves.
However, it can be easy to get carried away with millions of users spending hours posing, editing pictures and even buying followers!
Intrigued to discover Europe’s vainest countries, OnBuy.com used online search analytics tool Ahrefs to examine search volumes for ‘buy followers’, ‘how to edit selfies’, ‘gain Instagram followers’, and other similar phrases to determine which country is most obsessed with themselves.
Which European countries are the most selfie-obsessed?
At the top of the list is the United Kingdom, with a whopping 108,630 selfie-related searches each month alone. 10,000 of those can be attributed to people searching for “buy Instagram followers”, 6,500 to “how to get more followers on Instagram” and 2,600 to “how to get more Instagram followers”.
It seems like people would rather cheat their way to fame than gain it organically.
Following behind in second place is Spain with 75,050 monthly searches. When it comes to narcissism, it seems the Spanish are most obsessed with editing apps. Of the monthly searches, 31,000 come from searches for PicsArt. On this app users are able to edit their appearance, from hiding their eye bags, acne and even changing their hair colour! Other popular app searches are VSCO (31,000 monthly searches) and Foodie (6,900 monthly searches).
In third place is Germany. OnBuy.com found people here make 63, 670 monthly searches related to selfies, with 60,080 of those for editing apps, the most popular being: VSCO (28,000 monthly searches), PicsArt (17,000 monthly searches) and Photo Lab Picture Editor (4,100 monthly searches).
Other countries that ranked as the top 10 vainest were:
4th – France (60,440 monthly searches)
5th – Italy (43,370 monthly searches)
6th – Poland (29,270 monthly searches)
7th – Greece (27,150 monthly searches)
8th – Sweden (26,940 monthly searches)
9th – Netherlands (24,330 monthly searches)
10th – Portugal (19,780 monthly searches)
Which European countries are the least selfie-obsessed?
Among the least selfie-obsessed countries, OnBuy.com found Hungary (9,410), Austria (8,960) and Czech Republic (4,910) ranked well.
Making it into the bottom three is Bulgaria with only 3,190 monthly searches. 90% of their searches come from editing apps, showing that enhancing photos is their main concern. PicsArt (900 monthly searches), FaceApp (800 monthly searches) and VSCO (700 monthly searches) are the three apps they most commonly search for.
Serbians are the second least obsessed with their image, raking in just 90 fewer monthly searches than Bulgaria with 3,100. Much like the other countries it falls near, the focus is on the apps – VSCO is the most sought after (1,900 monthly searches), followed by Facetune (250 monthly searches) and Photoshop (150 monthly searches).
Taking the title as Europe’s least selfie-obsessed country is Belarus with 3,080 monthly searches, 2,940 of which can be attributed to their love of editing apps. Much like Bulgaria their most searched for apps are PicsArt (900 monthly searches), FaceApp (800 monthly searches) and VSCO (700 monthly searches).
Edited
OnBuy.com surveyed 3,650 people to see how far some are willing to go to rake in likes. A surprising 58% of participants surveyed admitted to having edited a photo that they posted on social media.
OnBuy also found that social media users are most likely to edit their skin (64%), facial features (51%) and body (43%). With many of today’s social media influencers conforming to society’s beauty standards, it’s no surprise many feel the need to follow suit, even if that means presenting a false image of themselves.
Social media can be a numbers game and this is shown by the fact that 23% of participants have spent money to gain Instagram followers. Our need for fame and status doesn’t stop there though, as 18% also admitted to having paid for Instagram likes.
Methodology:
1. The top 20 European countries (excluding Russia) by population were found from https://www.worldometers.info/population/countries-in-europe-by-population/
2. A list of phrases were entered into Ahrefs to establish the average monthly search volumes for each country in Europe, the phrases include: “edit selfies”, “how to get more Instagram followers”, “buy followers”, “free likes on Instagram”, etc.
3. The number of searches were made relative to each country’s population to make the figures more comparable.
4. The list of search phrases was translated into each country’s language to account for language differences. The searches with Ahrefs were then repeated and the results can be found in the Translations tab. Averages were taken for each country because different numbers of search phrases were used (e.g. Belgium has three languages). Final scores are in the totals tab.
5. The absolute total and app totals were added together to find each country’s total number of monthly searches.
