You pulled out your phone, carefully framed and snapped the picture, and then posted it to social media. Now the big question: WILL IT GENERATE A LOT OF LIKES?
It turns out, there’s a science to it. In fact, marketing researchers at North Carolina State University have identified the combination of characteristics that make people “like” images on the social media platform Instagram.
“We are increasingly able to determine whether images included in social media messages are likely to garner interest from consumers,” says William Rand, co-author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of marketing at NCSU. “But a lot of the variables that we know affect public interest have very little to do with the images themselves.”
For example, a brand’s strength, the number of followers it has on Instagram and the text that goes with the image are important.
“We wanted to look at the role the actual image plays, focusing specifically on how the complexity of an image drives consumer engagement,” said Rand. “This is important information for the marketing community, because it can inform decisions about what sort of images to use to continuing building a brand.”
The paper, “Simplicity is not Key: Understanding Firm-Generated Social Media Images and Consumer Liking,” is published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.
The researchers looked at feature complexity and design complexity, which are two aspects of an image that people respond to.
Feature complexity refers to fundamental characteristics such as color and brightness. Design complexity refers to the actual things found in an image and how they are arranged.
They then identified six measures to assess various aspects of image complexity:
The researchers wrote a computer program to scan images and automatically generate scores for each of the six measures. They then analyzed 147,963 Instagram images using the model.
“We found that all six measures are important, but there were particular patterns in which images generated the most positive feedback,” said Rand.
When it comes to feature complexity, the study found that there is a sweet spot right in the middle. Consumers preferred images with some diversity of light and color, but not too much and not too little. The opposite is true for design complexity. People preferred images that were either very simple or very complex.
“We found that you could improve the number of likes of any given image by about 3% if you applied the appropriate filter to address issues related to feature complexity,” added Rand. “Our model also suggests that optimizing both feature and design complexity could improve consumer engagement by about 19%.”
Time to grab your phone and start collecting those likes!