To learn the way meals styling impacts social media engagement, researchers collected practically 54,000 images from the Instagram accounts of 90 meals influencers, then used machine studying to check all the things from their coloration and brightness to their complexity and repetition within the pictures. In addition they measured the common calorie density of the meals pictured. Then, the researchers analyzed how a lot engagement every picture had generated on-line.
The meals images that generated probably the most likes and clicks shared some attributes.
Photos with “arousing, heat colours equivalent to purple, orange and yellow” had been extra prone to generate engagement on-line, as had been these with repetition — suppose, a photograph of a tray of macarons versus a photograph of a single piece of fruit.
Pictures with extra function complexity, which the researchers outlined as richness in components and perceptual element, had been additionally extra prone to generate likes and feedback.
In distinction, images with extra compositional complexity, during which visible components clustered in a selected phase of the picture, generated much less engagement. Photos that had been brighter and extra colourful than common additionally obtained fewer likes and feedback.
The extra calorie-dense a meals picture was, the extra seemingly it was to get plenty of likes and feedback, the researchers discovered.
That will look like unhealthy information for these making an attempt to advertise wholesome meals on-line. However the researchers identified that the consequences of visible aesthetics had been extra pronounced for the low-calorie pictures, suggesting that just a few easy tweaks might make pictures of even wholesome meals extra palatable to social media customers.
“There are some neurological research that present as folks visually course of high-calorie meals, they course of them sooner than low-calorie pictures,” stated Muna Sharma, an information scientist who was a co-author of the research whereas a PhD pupil on the College of Georgia’s School of Household and Client Sciences, in a information launch. “So, when they’re a low-calorie picture, they provide extra consideration to all of those visible options. That signifies that if you wish to draw folks’s consideration to those lower-calorie meals, it’s a must to take care to focus on particular elements.”
Together with hotter colours, repetitive options and showcasing meals on a clear background might assist enhance engagement for lower-calorie meals, she says — and maybe assist wholesome meals pattern.
