For Better Social Media Engagement
Have you ever wondered what the secret is to getting your audience engaged on social media? With everything that is incorporated into making content there must be a secret trick to pull your audience in. Although there is no fool-proof way to create something everyone likes there are ways to make your photos more emotionally appealing for your audience.
Connecting with your audience’s emotions is a surefire way to get them to stop scrolling. Think of the last time you saw a commercial filled with photos of sad dogs with music playing in the background. The entire time the commercial plays 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. This is the kind of effect you want to create with your photographs. You want to create visuals that pull them in and connect with their emotions.
Before You Start
Before we get into 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. Here are a few things to keep in mind before you start taking photos.
Know Your Platform
Knowing your platform is a term you’ve probably heard before. It encompasses understanding features, tools, demographics and more. What we mean is, if you’re using Instagram make sure to use the carousel feature. If you’re using Youtube make sure that you make good use of the thumbnail feature. It’s important to know what features are available in the platform you’re using. These basic tools should be used in thoughtful collaboration with your images.
Additionally, understanding the demographic of your social media platform can make a big impact on creating the right emotionally-connecting content. For example, say that the persona you are targeting is a twenty-year-old gaming enthusiast. You’ll want to focus on Youtube or Twitch, because those are the platforms that your persona uses. The style and demographic of those platforms is much different than Pinterest or Reddit. Your content will have a better emotional impact when you learn the best way to reach your auadience.
The chart below shows the basic demographic information for the top 9 social media platforms.
Learn more here!
Know Your Audience
As you know, in order to create the right content, it’s key to know who your audience is. That means understanding the things they like, the things they don’t like, and what questions they have. Creating a buyer persona, analyzing your competitors, and surveying customers is a great way to learn what they value most. Certain social media platforms, like Instagram and Facebook, also provide data into where your audience is from, when they are most active, and what kinds of posts they are most interested in. Utilizing and understanding this information will give you key insight into your audiences’ behavior and patterns. When you know what your audience wants you can create content that will connect meaningfully with your audience.
Learn more here!
Watch What’s Trending
It can be hard to think of new and unique content. Following what is trending will help you see what works and will allow you to make it your own. Engagement trends ebb and flow. Researching ways that other brands are connecting to their audience’s emotions through images may give you the start you need. If you would like to dive deeper into how to stand out on social media, check out this previous blog post!
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 can be easy to get stuck doing the same thing each time you take a new photo. This can make it hard for your audience to connect emotionally to your images. There are a few things that can help boost the vibe of your overall photo content.
Using People in Your Images
Feature people in your photos! When your audience sees a person’s facial expression, the emotional connection of the content increases. Take this tiny trophy for example; This object may cause joy for some, but the object alone 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. It may include asking yourself these questions:
- What emotion do you want to express?
- Would this situation be enhanced if the subject was female, or male?
- What if they were tall or short?
- How would the audience be affected if the subject wore a certain outfit or color?
One thing that can help drastically is utilizing a model. I know that sentence may sound intimidating, but think about the revenue the photo will bring to your website. If you think it will create a genuine connection with your audience, consider paying a professional. Here’s why.
Models are trained to show emotion. Their facial expressions come off as genuine, and their effect on an audience is deeper than an amateur. If this seems financially difficult, still consider looking into it, pricing may surprise you.
Stock photos are not the same as hiring qualified personnel. Although some of these photos look professional, most of them are recognized by a wide audience. This takes away from the genuine emotion you’re trying to express and won’t help create that emotional impact you’re looking for.
Know Your Colors
In creating scroll stopping photographs, color plays the biggest role. Knowing how to use color to draw your audience into your photo and captivate them is a great way to build an emotional connection.
It’s important to not only know what colors compliment or contrast each other, but to know how they make your audience feel. Colors are associated with emotions in our brains, no matter how subtle or vibrant they are. Using color in your photographs can be a powerful tool to provoke emotion from your audience.
You can use bright, poppy colors to encourage your audience to feel playful and happy! You may want to take a different approach and include more subdued tones to make people feel sad or lonely. Warm tones will create positive, more exciting feelings, while cool tones will calm your audience and help them feel at peace.
We see uses of color combinations and how they influence our emotions daily whether we realize it or not. You’ve probably heard of fast food chains always using red and yellow to make us hungry. But do you know why this is significant?
Research shows “The red color stimulates appetite because of its effect on our metabolism, making red a popular color choice among fast food restaurants. The yellow color is also employed by fast food moguls to hijack customers’ interests – they gain customers’ attention, increase their appetite, and encourage them to eat”. Cited here.
Knowing the power of a color and what it does in the brain can help you establish an emotional connection with your audience. Before you start your next photoshoot, think about this: Do you want your audience to feel sad, longing or deep? Blues and grays will be your friend. How about excited, peppy and energized? Bright oranges, and yellows can help you do that. Use the power of color to establish a mood in your photos that will 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 emotional connection through photography, it’s important to keep in mind the style and types of light you are using. Different lighting styles can portray different messages and emotions to your audience, so choose wisely.
But why should you portray different emotions in your images? What’s the point? Well, posts that have a higher emotional value often perform better with engagement. So
any time you can use dynamic lighting to convey more emotion in your images, the better your post will engage your audience.
The most common lighting styles are:
● Flat lighting – Flat lighting hits the subject’s face straight on, flattening out any shadows that may be present. This is often used with product photography.
● Loop lighting – Loop lighting is created by having a source of light off to the side and pointed down towards the subject. This lighting style creates more depth and shadow then flat lighting, but isn’t as drastic of lighting as other styles.
● Rembrandt lighting – Also known as triangle lighting, rembrandt lighting is created by a light source placed higher than the subject and off to the side. It creates a highlight on the model’s cheek in the shape of a triangle which creates a very dramatic look. This style is very popular for portraits.
● Butterfly lighting – This lighting is created by placing the light source slightly above eye level. This creates shadows in the right places on your face to highlight the cheekbones.
● Catch lighting – This lighting is created when a bright light source is placed in front of the subject. 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 tend to 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 – This occurs when the subject is between the camera and the light source. This type of lighting can be very useful when you’re trying to emphasize the silhouette of your subject rather than capturing the details of their face.
● Underlighting – This is when the light comes from below the subject’s face. You may remember using this lighting technique when you told scary stories as a kid.
Take a look at this short video that will help you visualize what all these lighting styles look like:
Don’t just take our word for it, our survey speaks for itself!
We conducted a survey using the video examples to see what lighting styles depicted certain moods. If you want to gain ideas on what lighting styles you could use in your next project, click on this link!
Things That Kill the Vibe
Social media is constantly changing and because of this, things will either lower engagement on your images, or throw off your brand consistency if the algorithm doesn’t like what you shared. What works today might not work tomorrow. With this said, here’s a few things to avoid:
Using Too Much Text on Your Photographs
Think to yourself why people choose to digest visual content. Is it because of the text on top of the image, or the image underneath the text? If you’re using images in effective collaboration with your caption, there’s no need to put more than a few words on your image.
Some experts have tested this out and have said that images with no text actually perform better than those with text on them. This might be something you want to test out a bit to find the fine line between too much and just enough.
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’re easily able to place stickers, emojis, and buttons over an image. While these add-on visuals and tools are great, they need to be used sparingly so your image 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.
In fact, a recent study shows that the way images are structured plays a lot into the amount of engagement it gets. Certain characteristics like color, object count, object placement, can be altered to reach a higher amount of likes. According to the study, using these characteristics in just the right collaboration could 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. 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 their 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 their brand personality with something different. All of Chobani’s photography includes faces has smiling faces. From cheek to cheek, these faces are cheesing. This goes along with Chobani’s mission statement of “elevating our communities and making the world a healthier place.”
Testing the Waters
You can have the greatest video in the world but it won’t matter to many people if you do know the best way your audience perceives your style. It can be as easy as changing the title that can make or break your video. A great way to see what works best for you is A/B testing.
What is A/B testing? A/B testing creates different variants for your audience to receive and shows you the results of which variant performed better.
Think this is too good to be true? A/B testing was a huge reason why Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008. His marketing team noticed that a subscribe button could look better on their page. They also wanted to see what other things might affect subscriber click rate. They tested out many phrases and pictures/videos for people to see what worked best and there was one combination that increased subscriptions up 40%! The combination? A picture of the Obama family and the subscription button saying, “Learn more”.
Some Parting Wisdom
It may seem a little 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 that you don’t need to be perfect, you just need to be you! Applying everything that you learned from this article will do nothing for you if you don’t share your personality within your socials. People are drawn to high quality posts that seem genuine and personable.
Trends come and go. With the internet, they go quickly . By building your own personal style and applying it to your social media platforms, people will begin to notice who you are. When you think of Wes Anderson or Tim Burton movies, what comes to mind? Both of these directors have a unique and distinct style, recognizable by many. By being yourself, people will grow a connection with what you are sharing.
If you think that a post you want to share does not match up exactly with what you have learned from this article, that’s okay! Take things one step at a time and try to incorporate them into your work. The best kind of success isn’t built overnight, it is built 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 to create a viral video, however, the goal is to engage your audience. Creating a viral video with no possibility of engagement is a huge loss when it comes to potential consumers. Building an audience who wants to see more of your work is the real goal.
People want to resonate with others they can relate to. If you are genuine, people will be drawn to what you have to say and your work will be all the more worthwhile to look at and engage with.
Recent Comments