Study: Colors Increase Social Media Engagement
Complex images in a social media post tend to capture greater user attention, leading to increased engagement with those posts, researchers found.
NOTRE DAME, Ind. — Social media has become the main stage for marketing in the digital age, and the adage “content is king” has never been more relevant.
Marketers are increasingly focused on creating social media content to capture user attention and drive engagement with content. One proven strategy to increase such engagement is using social media images. A 2021 report by the social media management software company Sprout Social found that nearly 53% of content marketers consider images crucial for achieving their social media goals, and approximately 70% of social media users prefer interacting with image-based posts over text-only content.
Despite this clear preference for social media images, there has been little research about which specific image characteristics most effectively boost user engagement and when that engagement takes place. A new study from the University of Notre Dame addresses how color complexity affects user engagement on social media.
Posts containing complex images with more varied color patterns tend to capture greater user attention and lead to increased engagement, according to lead author Vamsi Kanuri, the Viola D. Hank Associate Professor of Marketing at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. Kanuri’s findings, “Standing out from the crowd: When and why color complexity in social media images increases user engagement,” were recently published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing.