There’s apparently a science to getting more likes on Instagram. The famous, and those paying for views, might not need it as much, but here’s some good news for people who don’t pay (and do care).
Researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) fed 1.48 lakh images into a software program and found that six parameters help determine why users tend to like one sunset or selfie over another: edges in a picture (defining objects from background), symmetry, distribution of
There’s apparently a science to getting more likes on Instagram. The famous, and those paying for views, might not need it as much, but here’s some good news for people who don’t pay (and do care).
Researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) fed 1.48 lakh images into a software program and found that six parameters help determine why users tend to like one sunset or selfie over another: edges in a picture (defining objects from background), symmetry, distribution of colour, distribution of luminance, number of objects, and their orientation (are they spaced evenly; angled in complementary ways).
The likeability depends, in other words, on visual complexity, says William Rand, associate professor of marketing at NCSU and co-author of the study (with lead author Gijs Overgoor from Rochester Institute of Technology and two others from different universities).
“Visual complexity is made up of two related concepts, feature complexity and design complexity,” Rand says. The former relates to colour and lighting; the latter to symmetry and the number of objects in the frame.
When it comes to feature complexity on Instagram, people crave the Goldilocks principle, the study found. They don’t want too much or too little diversity in colour and brightness. So go after that stunning sunset by all means, but don’t be tempted to turn that rose-gold sky bright pink. Brightness and saturation work better, according to the study findings, when kept within a realistic range.
In terms of design complexity, people preferred the extremes: images that were either very simple or extremely complex, with either a lot going on in the frame or very little. Filters can help, the findings show, at least in terms of levelling out colour, light and shadow. “By choosing the right filter, we found, you can expect to improve the number of likes by 3%,” says Rand.
The study, published online in the International Journal of Research in Marketing in December, took four years to complete, and is expected to have applications in digital marketing. Rand hopes it will also help designers and entrepreneurs operating with Instagram as their primary platform.
“The goal of marketing has shifted from a mass-market approach to marketing to ‘one’,” says Rand. But when it comes to social media marketing, there’s room for a lot more research, he adds. “We know that images affect purchase decisions, for instance, but we still don’t know what specific parameters of an image are more likely to drive purchase decisions.”
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