Topping the chart of the most Instagrammed capitals in the world is London, with an impressive 31.3 million Instagram posts. Other cities which scored highly were Paris,  Moscow and Jakarta. Australian capital Canberra placed 67th. There was no bigger gap between any city in the top 200 capitals and the countries' most popular city than in Australia, with Sydney pulling in 1,500 percent more posts than the capital. View the complete list above.

As if Instagram wasn’t appealing enough to the travel industry, it’s gone and introduced some brand new features for explorers. The app is introducing a largely improved search experience, including the addition of Places Search, which makes it easier to discover new places around the world. Ideal for researching exotic locations, exploring a new getaway destination or a hot new restaurant, taking a virtual look at a hotel or just seeing whether it's sunny at your favourite beach, the new feature brings a world of advantages for any travellers. On top of this, Instagram is also adding Top Search, which lets you search across People, Places and Tags all from a single search box. Find out more.

Instagram's advertising product has received a significant upgrade that will appeal to travel marketers of all kinds: it's called Carousel Ads. Rather than one image sitting in the standard Instagram scroll, small buttons will appear below ads with multiple images. Users can then swipe to experience the other images, with a final screen featuring a call-to-action that promises to create an actual conversion funnel for advertising on the visual photography medium that is Instagram. The company says it is trying to replicate the feeling of a multi-page magazine spread with the inherent tracking advantages that a digital experience provides. The viability of these units for travel greatly depends on the cost, which is dependent on engagement. If the conversions are low, then the unit, may not be financially viable for travel marketing. Read more on the Instagram business blog.

Travel hashtags - #types and #reasonsforuseTwitter (and its social media cousins at Facebook and Instagram) has ensured hashtags have become part of modern verbal vernacular. The use of hashtags has become popular in areas as diverse as politics, sports, music, and of course, travel-related tweets or to accompany pictures on Instagram or status updates on Facebook. British online travel agency Sunshine.co.uk has undertaken research into which hashtags are the most popular among UK leisure travel consumers, as part of an ongoing study into their social media habits. 42% of the 2,100 respondents post updates to their social media accounts during a trip, with approximately three-quarters using hashtags as part of their comments. The most popular hashtags were holiday (91%), wish you were here (57%) and YOLO (44%). Click here to learn more.

Can you guess Instagram's most geotagged travel destination in the world? It’s not Bora Bora's beautiful beaches, nor is it the skyscrapers in New York, or even the Burj in Dubai. It is, in fact, the happiest place on earth. Instagram has revealed the most geotagged destinations for 2014, including the most Instagrammed places in Australia. Click here to take a look at the gallery for the top 10 around the world as well as Australia's top 10.

Images are more effective in communicating emotions and ideas than words. The reason for this is two-fold; humans interpret the world through visual queues before learning to read and the human brain processes images faster than text. An MIT study in 2014 revealed that it takes as little as 13 milliseconds for humans to process a dozen images. When it comes to printed information, an average American adult reads five words per second. Instagram unlocks the attributes of an image to connect people to their friends, family and brands in an unassuming way. Travellers are looking to their social networks for inspiration and recommendations, before, during and after their holidays. As user generated content is native to Instagram, it is becoming the most effective marketing platform in the evaluation stage - one step away from the purchase decision. Click here for more information.