Have you ever wondered about the secret to engaging your audience on social media? Everything incorporated into making content must be a secret trick to pull your audience in. Although there is no foolproof way to create something everyone likes, there are ways to make your photos more emotionally appealing to your audience. 

Connecting with your audience’s emotions is a powerful way to capture their attention and stop scrolling. Remember the last time you saw a commercial filled with photos of sad dogs with music playing in the background? Your eyes are glued to the screen, and by the time it ends, tears are streaming down your face, and you’re on the phone to buy a rescue dog. They’re effective because they tap into our emotions and create a connection with the viewer. You can use this same technique to create visuals that will pull your audience in and resonate with them. 

Before You Start 

Before we explore how to use emotion in photography to connect with your audience, it’s good to head back to the basics. Making sure you have a solid foundation supporting the photos you post can make your content connect better with your audience. So here are a few things to remember before you start taking pictures. 

Know Your Platform 

Knowing your platform is a term you’ve probably heard before. It means understanding the features, tools, and demographics of the platform you’re using. Such as, if you’re using Instagram, know about the carousel feature. If you’re using Youtube, use the thumbnail feature well. It’s important to know what features are available on your platform. These essential tools should be used in thoughtful collaboration with your images. 

Understanding the demographic of your social media platform can significantly impact creating the right emotionally-connective content. For instance, if your target persona is a twenty-year-old gaming enthusiast, you’ll want to focus on YouTube or Twitch, as those platforms are popular with this demographic. The style and tone of these platforms are vastly different from Pinterest or Reddit, so it’s crucial to tailor your content to the particular platform you’re using and its intended audience. Doing so gives you a better chance of emotionally connecting with your audience.

The chart below shows the basic demographic information for the top 9 social media platforms.

Know Your Audience 

Know your audience’s likes, dislikes, and questions to create emotionally appealing images. Businesses can use data from various platforms; companies can analyze their audience behavior and patterns. This can help media users discover trends in their audience’s trends and connect with them. 

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-target-audience

Watch What’s Trending 

Keeping an eye on changing trends will help you think of new and unique content. Following current trends can give you ideas for creating unique and engaging content that resonates with your audience’s emotions. Engagement trends ebb and flow, so researching how others connect with their audiences through images can provide valuable insights.

Check out our article to learn how to stand out on social media and create content that connects with your audience. http://stratezine.com/2022/06/10/easy-steps-to-stand-out-on-social-media/

Things That Boost The Vibe 

Now let’s get into the good stuff. It can be challenging to create fresh, emotion-evoking images that reach out and grab your audience’s attention. It’s easy to fall into the trap of doing the same techniques each time you take a new photo, making it hard for your audience to connect emotionally to your images. Fortunately, a few things can help boost the vibe of your photos and get you unstuck. 

Using People in your Images 

One of the most effective ways to boost the appeal of your photos, feature people in your photos! When your audience sees a person’s facial expression, it instantly increases the emotional connection to the piece. For example, take this tiny trophy, which may cause joy but does not elicit real emotion.

Now check out the photo below it. You don’t have to question the emotions this woman is dealing with. She is relatable and genuine. An audience can empathize with other humans, but It’s hard to empathize with an object. 

Consider the subject of your photograph when planning for a shoot. What emotion do you want to express? Would this situation be enhanced if the subject was female or male? Tall or short? How would the audience be affected if the subject wore a particular outfit or color? These are all things to consider when planning a photoshoot. 

One thing that can help drastically is utilizing a model. Consider paying a professional to model if it creates a genuine connection with your audience. Models are trained to show emotion. Their facial expressions are genuine, and their effect on an audience is more profound than an amateur. Stock photos may seem like a cheaper alternative, but they need more authenticity, as a professional model can bring. Stock photos can be too recognizable to a broad audience. This takes away from the genuine emotion you’re trying to express. It doesn’t help create an emotional impact. 

Know Your Colors 

In creating scroll-stopping photographs, color, or the lack thereof, is everything. Knowing how to use color to attract your audience and captivate your photo is a great way to build an emotional connection. 

It’s crucial to know what colors complement or contrast each other and how they make your audience feel. Colors are associated with emotions in our brains, no matter how subtle or vibrant they are. So using color in your photographs to get emotional reactions from your audience can be powerful. 

For example, bright and bold colors can make your audience feel playful and happy, while more subdued tones can create a sense of sadness or loneliness. Warm tones induce positivity and excitement, while cool styles can be calming.

Colors influence our emotions and actions subtly. For example, chains often use red and yellow in their branding to stimulate hunger and increase sales. These colors can create urgency and excitement in their customers.

Knowing the power of color and what it does in the brain can help you establish an emotional connection with your audience. Before you start your next photoshoot, consider these questions: Do you want your audience to feel sad, longing, or deep? Blues and grays will be your friend. How about excited, peppy, and energized? Use the power of color to establish a mood in your photos to help establish an emotional connection with your audience. 

Below is a brief list of what colors often symbolize to help get you started.

Choosing the Right Lighting Style 

To help create an emotional connection through photography, it’s essential to consider the style and types of light being used. Different lighting styles can convey other messages and emotions to your audience, so choose wisely. 

Why should you portray different emotions in your images? The point is that your images will be better with engagement. Using dynamic lighting to convey emotion in your photos will improve your post engagement. 

The most common lighting styles are: 

● Flat lighting – This is often used with product photography. Flat lighting hits the subject face straight on, flattening out any shadows. 

● Loop lighting – This lighting style creates more depth and shadow than flat lighting but isn’t as drastic of lighting as other styles. 

● Rembrandt lighting – Also known as triangle lighting. This is very popular for portraits. It creates a highlight on the model’s cheek in a triangle shape, creating a dramatic look. 

● Butterfly lighting – A model’s favorite type of lighting. This creates shadows in the right places on your face to highlight the cheekbones. 

● Catchlighting – This is the light that reflects in a person’s eye and helps to tell a story. Without a catch light, the subject’s eyes look flat and lifeless. 

● Short and Broad lighting – Short lighting refers to lighting the side of the face farthest away from the camera. Broad lighting means you light the side of the face closest to the camera. 

● Backlighting occurs when the subject is between the camera and the light source. This type of lighting can be beneficial when you’re trying to emphasize the silhouette of your subject rather than capturing the details of their face. 

● Underlighting – The light comes from below the subject’s face. You may remember using this lighting technique when you told scary stories as a kid. 

Things That Kill The Vibe 

And finally, we’ve reached our words of warning. We will discuss things that can negatively impact image engagement and brand consistency. As a disclaimer, note that social media is constantly changing. What doesn’t work today might work tomorrow. Here are a few things to be cautious of: 

Using too much text on your photographs 

People like to digest images rather than text. Collaborating your caption effectively conveys your message without adding more than a few words to your image. Experts have found that images without text perform better than those with text. Determining the balance between too much and just enough text on your pictures is worth experimenting with.

Visual clutter 

Have you ever been scrolling through Instagram, stopped on a post, and asked yourself, “what am I looking at?” 

This happens too often, especially on Instagram stories, where you can easily place stickers, emojis, and buttons over an image. While these add-on visuals and tools are great, they must be used sparingly so your photo is not buried underneath them. 

There might be clutter in your actual photography as well. Too many points of interest in an image will confuse your viewer. This might distract from the message your social media post is trying to convey, lowering your engagement. 

A recent study shows that how images are structured greatly influences the engagement it gets. Specific characteristics, like color, object count, and placement, can be altered to reach more likes. According to the study, using these characteristics in a good collaboration could result in 19% more engagement. Following these study suggestions could drastically fix visual clutter.

Missing the Mark with your Faces 

No matter what you post on social media, you want everything to reflect your brand personality. Therefore, consistency is vital when it comes to social media branding. If your social media photography doesn’t match the energy of your brand personality, you can throw brand consistency out the window. 

Let’s compare two brands to illustrate this. The photography Nike uses on its social media features serious, determined faces. For the most part, these faces are straight and confident, with the occasional smile here and there. This facial visual pairs well with their intensely motivational slogan, “Just Do It.”

On the other hand, Chobani compliments its brand personality with something different. All of Chobani’s photography includes faces have smiling faces. From cheek to cheek, these faces are cheesing. This aligns with Chobani’s mission statement of “elevating our communities and making the world healthier.”

Testing the Waters 

You can have the most excellent video in the world, but it won’t matter to many people if you know how your audience perceives your style best. Understanding how your audience perceives your content is crucial for its success. Simple changes, such as changing the title, can make or break the content engagement. To find out what works best for your audience, A/B testing is a great tool. A/B testing involves creating different content variations and analyzing which version performs better. 

A/B testing was a key strategy in helping Obama win the White House in 2008. His website team saw that a subscribe button could look better on their page. However, they also wanted to see what other things might affect whether people click or don’t click the subscribe button. So they tested out many phrases and pictures/videos for people to see what worked best, and one combination increased subscriptions by 40%! The combination? A picture of the Obama family and the subscription button saying, “Learn more.” 

Some Parting Wisdom? 

With everything you have learned today, it can seem overwhelming to think that so many little things affect what people decide to look at when they go through social media. The good news is you don’t need to be perfect! You just need to be you! Applying everything you learned today will do nothing for you if you do not share your personality. People are drawn to high-quality posts that seem genuine. 

By building your style and applying it to your social media platforms, people will begin to notice who you are, even if it is a viral trend you are doing. Think of Wes Anderson or Tim Burton movies. Without seeing the director’s name, you can assume who is behind the film with how things look on the screen. By being yourself, people will grow a connection with what you are sharing.

If you think a post you want to share does not match up precisely with what you have learned today… that’s okay! Take things one step at a time and see what you can incorporate into your work each day. The best kind of success isn’t built overnight. It is made by earning solid supporters one day at a time who recognize your work and decide they want to see more of it. You may think you want a viral video, which is excellent! 

But creating a video with no possibility of engagement is a huge loss when it comes to potential consumers. The goal is to make a video that engages your audience. Building a loyal audience who can relate to you is the real goal. 

People want to resonate with people they can relate to. So if you are authentic, you will draw people to what you say, and your work will be all the more worthwhile to engage with.