Huub Keulers

Tip: How to Make Social Media Photos Stand Out More?

Monday 11 April 2022, 20:02 by | 4,411 views | 2 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

When followers scroll past your photos on Instagram or Facebook, you have a fraction of a second to grab their attention.

Research shows, however, that the colours in your photos can make people more likely to click on your photo instead of scrolling past. So there is a good chance that the colours on your social media profile make a big difference. Make use of this.

Shown by research


Visual analysis and marketing platform Curalate analysed eight million social media photos to see which colours receive more likes than others.

Photos with blue as the prominent colour often received 24 per cent more likes than images with red as the most prominent colour.

Adding a touch of colour is not enough. According to the research, photos with just one dominant colour receive 17 per cent more attention than photos with more than one main colour. Just 10 per cent of the images in the study had a single striking colour.

The colour blue


It also turns out that blue is the favourite colour of most people. We tend to associate blue with openness, so they are more likely to want to stay in contact with that colour. Whatever colour you show as the prominent colour in your photos, it does need to stand out.

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Other colours that make your photos work well


Red represents impulsiveness and warmth

SM Julia Timohina

Photo: Julia Timohina

Orange represents happiness and energy

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Yellow represents attention

SM Pisanu Thoyod

Photo: Pisanu Thoyod

Purple represents inspiration and trust.

SM Inge Schuster

Photo: Inge Schuster

It works best when you use larger areas for a prominent colour. Or areas of two contrasting colours from the colour spectrum. Think of warm and cool colours, yellow, orange or red combined with blue, purple or green.

A dark background combined with a prominent colour is also often a good combination. Especially when your colours are strong and vibrant.

But above all, do what makes you feel good


But at the end of the day, I encourage you to simply be creative and post what makes you happy. If the strawberries you ate during lunch were tasty, healthy and downright photogenic, post that photo.

Your Instagram page is about making yourself proud, not about pleasing other people.

Here are a few more examples of the deliberate use of colours in your image.

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SM Qi Ding

Photo: Qi Ding

SM Alexey Nikitin

Photo: Alexey Nikitin

SM Carsten Heyer2


Photo: Carsten Heyer

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Huub Keulers

About the author

Huub Keulers is een enthousiasmerende veelzijdige freelance fotograaf woonachtig in Elsloo (Li). Hij is gespecialiseerd in sport-, bedrijfs-, straat-, honden en portretfotografie. Daarnaast is Huub auteur van diverse educatieve fotografieboeken en verzorgt hij allerlei fotoworkshops, masterclasses en lezingen.

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2 comments

  1. Henk-Jan Winkeldermaat
    Henk-Jan Winkeldermaat wrote on Tuesday 12 April 2022 at 12:01  | reply

    Fortunately, many photographers don't blindly follow the like-driven marketing advice, otherwise it would become a beautiful, but also boring affair.

    Translated from Dutch.
  2. Gerard
    Gerard wrote on Wednesday 13 April 2022 at 11:20  | reply

    educational, this mentioning of the associations between color and feeling... especially as we are seeing the Blue/Yellow combo (of Ukraine) a lot these days; Openness, Contact + Attention ...

    Translated from Dutch.

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