Color Theory and Social Media

Color theory.. When one hears this phrase they may think of several different mediums. Things such as painting, fashion, design or photography, but has anyone ever thought social media? 

Color theory is the study of how different colors work together and how they affect our emotions as humans. So again let’s think Social Media. By this point you are probably wondering how color theory and social media are even related? 

By the definition of color theory it affects our emotions as humans. Social media also affects our emotions as humans and what we post to social media especially affects our emotions as humans. So how as a social media marketer can you use this to help you gain followers and increase engagement on social media?

The Stratezine team has the secret! We took 400 pictures from various photography Instagram accounts and ran them through Adobe Capture. Adobe capture gives users the power to create production-ready color themes and patterns—all from a single photo.

From these 400 pictures, we evaluated the hue, saturation, and brightness (HSB) values of each image. We then put them into an Excel spreadsheet and created graphs to analyze the effectiveness of different images through photographers on Instagram.

We chose to focus on popular niches of photography and chose three categories, action sports, landscape and wedding/portrait photography to specifically analyze.

We looked at five different HSB color values that were most prominent in the image to see the colors on the rainbow wheel. The lower values are darker colors and the higher numbers are stronger colors. We learned that there is little to no correlation based on the hues of images posted and engagement levels.

Lane Williams, research and analytics professor at Brigham Young University-Idaho, instructed our team to pick certain categories to determine photographers who are low and high functioning. 

“There is an outside influence that could bias the results and skew the level of effectiveness,” said Williams.

Williams suggested looking at the top ten percent and measuring them super close to determine their distribution between lots of likes or little to none. By doing such, we learned that posts with natural colors had more engagement on Instagram. Through looking at the data It was also presented that the brighter the color, the lower the engagement level. Which tells us that over exposing images is not the way to go.

From the data study, contrast was the most impactful thing in photography. If the image had strong contrast and was able to grasp the viewer’s attention, it performed very well. 

We sat down with  Ryan Robbins (@robbinstudio @fezzari_bicycles). Ryan Robbins is a photo/videographer who specializes in action sports. Robbins is based out of Pleasant Grove, Utah, and currently creates content for Fezzari Bikes (based out of Lindon, Utah) as a content creator.

Q: How has your social media strategy evolved since beginning your presence?

A: Our big focus was making sure our profile was an accurate representation of the brand, and that meant having really highly polished, nice photography, and occasional videography. Everything was super-curated so that if someone saw a piece of content, They would go to our profile and continue to see that level of quality. 

Nowadays [people] do not care what the profile looks like. As long as it’s engaging, we’re seeing consistent growth and the metrics that are associated with the page are overall positive and trending. That’s what we prioritize now, which we probably should have been doing back then, but it was just the trend, right? We’ve gone from an overall curated aesthetic feed to funny Instagram reels. Just more engaging short-form content.

Q: Would you say quality has gone down too?

A: It’s going towards more just quick, easy posts. It kills me inside because I want it to look perfect, and I want to still curate it. It’s funny, we’ll be in the house and we say, “hey, let’s grab the camera, set this up, do this action, and make sure our audio is this.” We do more of what’s the instinct, you know, the inclination is, let’s do it really well.

We also sat down with Kendra Sutton (@ksuttonphoto) to get her insight to color theory and engagement. Sutton is a photographer, educator, and mentor who also specializes in wedding, couple, and senior portrait photography. Sutton travels across the United States to serve clients who find her through her different social media channels.

Q: What do you think are some of the most important design principles?

A: I feel like aesthetically, the colors need to match. I don’t necessarily think that there’s only one color palette that will do well, but I do like a consistent [one]. If someone wore a bright red dress, I probably wouldn’t post that one. All my colors are greens, blues, and oranges. I would also say another is emotion, I want them to feel something.

The conclusion to all this data? Just be authentic. Images posted to Instagram that are natural and have good balance will perform the best. These images will capture people’s attention and ultimately increase your engagement