FOUR Dorset beaches have been named in the top 30 of the most popular on Instagram.

Research by Kind Water, a water softener company, gathered Instagram data to reveal exactly where the most beautiful beaches of the UK are.

The South of England has four out of five of the most popular UK beaches on the social media site with Brighton beach, Durdle Door beach, and Bournemouth beach being the top three staycation beaches with a combined total of 1.094 million posts on Instagram.

Dorset Echo: Durdle Door by Chris WhiteDurdle Door by Chris White

Durdle Door ranked as number two, which is no surprise considering its popularity with visitors last year.

In recent years the areas of Lulworth and Durdle Door have both grown in popularity due to factors such as social media and TV appearances.

On Instagram, there are a total of 204,697 of the popular beauty spot.

Bournemouth beach grabbed the number three spot, with 124,975 posts on Instagram.

Dorset Echo: Bournemouth beach by Sára Regina CsekeBournemouth beach by Sára Regina Cseke

Further down the list at number nine is Hengistbury Head beach which has a total of 40,905 posts on Instagram.

Sandbanks beach ranked as number 16 with 21,871 Instagram posts.

Kind Water collated a list of the 30 most popular beaches and then searched Instagram for the number of images that have been posted on the app alongside the hashtags most closely associated with each beach.

Dorset Echo: Hengistbury Head beach by Elizabeth ChallisHengistbury Head beach by Elizabeth Challis

This number was then used to rank each location from most to least Instagrammed.