An analysis of my past 12 Instagram postings, using the sum of the number of likes and comments as the engagement metric, have yielded the following conclusions. First, the top performers that received the most engagement were interestingly all solo shots of myself. This could perhaps be explained by the fact that attention is less divided when viewing a solo shot, and thus the viewer cannot move onto the profiles of other users tagged before liking the photo. In the case of group photos, photos featuring people and groups that a lot of my social media friends are familiar with yielded more engagement. The background of the photo also seemed to play a key role. In my top performing photos, I took up a relatively small part of the space, compared to the middle and bottom performers, which had very little room for the background, giving off a sense of cramped space. Interestingly, the backgrounds in my top performers showed famous/ exotic/ outdoors sites like the Alps, Golden Gate Bridge, Thai ruins, etc. that were clearly denoted by location tags. Middle and bottom performers usually did not include location tags. Colors and lighting also seemed to be an important factor, as top performers tended to be brighter and feature more vivid colors, giving off a more positive and uplifting vibe. Geometric symmetry also seemed to play a role, with top performs being more geometrically symmetrical than the middle and bottom performers, which usually did not feature the subject in the center. In terms of content, photos highlighting notable life events/ unique events yielded more engagement than photos featuring an everyday event or location, as one would expect. Lastly, caption did not seem to be a significant variable in determining engagement, though shorter one-word captions tended to draw the most engagement.
