Color complexity in social media posts leads to more engagement, new research shows
If you work in digital marketing, you don’t need to be told a picture’s worth a thousand words. More than half of content marketers say images are crucial for achieving their social media goals, and a staggering 70% of users prefer image-based posts over text, surveys have found.
As a professor of business who knows the issues social media managers face while picking images for their posts – and who collected thousands of Facebook posts from two organizations in different industries – I saw an opportunity.
Color complexity is similar to colorfulness, but it’s not quite the same: It’s measured as color variation across pixels in an image, and our brains process it subliminally. The more the brain has to decipher color variations across neighboring pixels, the harder it has to work.
Fortunately, advanced computer vision technology makes it easier than ever to measure color complexity, and biometric eye-tracking makes it possible to see what images grab people’s attention in real time.
