Want More Instagram Likes? Try Leaving the Filter at Home

Want More Instagram Likes? Try Leaving the Filter at Home

We've all seen it and we've all judged it. Maybe you've even used it. You know what I'm talking about, the dreaded "#nofilter." It's all over in Instagram, to the tune of 135,251,455 posts at the time I wrote this sentence (and that number jumped by 20k after checking it again just a few minutes later). If you hate your life enough to actually click on this hashtag, you will be inundated with thousands, nay, MILLIONS of photos claiming to be filter-free when they are quite obviously everything but. Well I hate to break it to you, but the #nofilter crowd might just be onto something.Self proclaimed "Social Media Scientist" Dan Zarrella completed a study last year where he analyzed almost 1.5 million images uploaded to Instagram by over 500,000 users. His study assessed the impact of hastags, filter usage, image color and more, finding that bright, de-saturated photos that primarily made up of "cool" colors (such as grey, blue, and green) all tend to get more likes-per-follower.

One of the most interesting things that his study revealed, however, is that images that made no use of one of Instagram's built in filters outperformed images that did have a filter applied; and pretty handily too! Now, this could obviously owe itself to a wide variety of factors and I had two thoughts in particular that I thought were relevant:

  • Many photographers upload their completed images to Instagram, and don't use a filter.

    • I often upload my #notiphone images to Instagram after editing them on my computer, as many photographers do. National Geographic's Instagram page (for instance) seems to do this, and their images average around 200k-300k likes. Not bad. So there is a definite possibility that a good number of "filter free" image uploads are coming from photographers who have already edited their images by more traditional means.
  • This study only accounts for Instagram filters, and not other editing software.

    • Similar to my point above, Zarrella's study only checked to see if images made use of Instagram's in-app filters. There is no real way to check to see if images have been edited using VSCO Cam, Snapseed, or any other variety of editing apps (side note: anyone still using Hipstamatic??).

Regardless of how you feel about filter usage in general, Zarrella's study offers some neat insight into what sort of images seem to increase likes and comments, and what types don't. Check out his findings in the infographic below, then comment with some of your best tips and practices for generating interaction on your Instagram posts.

increase isntagram likes infographic

[Via Lifehacker and Dan Zarrella

Andrew Strother's picture

Andrew is a professional photographer based in Houston, Texas. Texas is better than all other states including Canada.

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9 Comments

Interesting article.

" If you hate your life enough to actually click on this hashtag, you will be inundated with thousands, nay, MILLIONS of photos claiming to be filter-free"
Well, considering that I've both used the #nofilter hashtag and viewed other images with the same hashtag, I guess I'll just go sit in the corner and start hating myself...

To be honest, so have I. It does make me cringe to know that when I tag my images with that, they're probably going to get lost in the sea of sadness that seems to dominate that hashtag though.

So I need to add that hashtag to 100% of my images now?

I would much rather be found by the quality of my images than for a bloated description full of hashtags. Plus, it just looks tacky and desperate to include tons of hashtags.

Tell this to stock images gurus... ;)

touché

Photos with nipples get the most likes. #duh

Interesting trends, especially with aspects like color temperature and brightness. Too bad he doesn't present any actual statistics to demonstrate whether any of these trends are significant and meaningful -- there has to be a ton of noise in a dataset like that.

Agreed, I think this infographic was primarily a teaser for an expanded talk he was doing at a social media conference so I get why he held some of the numbers back. His base findings though definitely seem to coincide with my own personal experience on IG.