Washington: Want more likes and comments on your social media profile. Post photos with human faces instead of scenery or painting!
Pictures with human faces are 38 per cent more likely to receive likes than photos with no faces on Instagram, a new study has found. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Yahoo Labs, who looked at 1.1 million photos on Instagram, also found that pictures with human faces are 32 per cent more likely to attract comments.
The study is one of the first to examine how photos with faces drive engagement on large-scale, image-sharing communities. The researchers also found that the number of faces in the photo, their age or gender didn't make a difference.
On average, pictures of kids or teens aren't any more popular than those of adults, even though Instagram is most popular among younger people. The study also noticed that men and women have the same chances of getting likes or comments. A few factors did play a role. As expected, people with more followers attracted more engagement - but only if they didn't overdo it, researchers said.
"The more you post, the less feedback you're going to get. Posting too much decreases likes two times faster than comments," said Saeideh Bakhshi, who led the study. Bakhshi also said that the more photos someone uploads, the lower the probability any single one has of getting likes or comments.
She and her team, which included adviser Eric Gilbert and Yahoo Research Scientist David Shamma, used face detection software to scan the photos. While the study examined how people react to photos with faces, the researchers stopped short of determining why users behave that way. "Even as babies, people love to look at faces.
Faces are powerful channels of non-verbal communication. We constantly monitor them for a variety of contexts, including attractiveness, emotions and identity," said Bakhshi. Regardless, knowing that photos with faces drive more engagement could have practical implications.
Gilbert noted that social media sites such as Flickr or Pinterest could increase their search ranking and keep consumers onsite and active by featuring human faces in their online content. "Designers could also use this knowledge to quickly filter, prioritise and highlight photos shared by followers," said Gilbert. "Especially pictures that have just been submitted and haven’t had enough time to pick up very many likes or comments yet," said Gilbert.
