Pictures of Faces Get More Likes on Instagram

            According to a Mashable article about a study made by Georgia Tech, people are more drawn to pictures with faces in them. Over a million Instagram pictures were tested, and the results were that pictures featuring a face were 38 percent more likely to receive likes from followers, and 32 percent more likely to receive comments.

            The article goes on to say that we are naturally drawn to faces, which makes perfect sense. We like people and looking at people and reading about people. I think that’s part of what makes social media so successful. It allows us to interact with people without ever leaving our couch.

            I checked out my own Instagram, and noted that I have received the most likes on pictures of myself and my friends, even though only about 25 percent of my photos have people in them. I’m not one to take selfies and post them for no reason.

It is interesting that faces inspire more likes. I do seem to stop more often when there are people in the pictures while I am scrolling through Instagram on my phone. I want to see who they are with and what they are doing.

I think this discovery is important for businesses and their social media strategies. It would be easy to assume that an ad on Facebook with an image of a person vacuuming rather than just vacuum would cause a user to be more likely to click on the ad and check out the product. People want to see people, and relate to people. It’s important to keep in mind that when it comes to marketing a product or service.

TOMS Coffee

            TOMS has been one of my favorite organizations for a while now, and I’m happy to see that they are still thinking of creative new ideas to help those in need. TOMS Coffee is the newest campaign, partnering with the Water for People organization to donate a week of clean water to a person in need for each bag of coffee purchased, under the usual tagline, One for One.

            This is an interesting tactic because water is not as tactile as shoes or eyeglasses, which are other TOMS products. Clean water is so much more important, however, so I applaud the TOMS company for what they are doing. The clean water is being provided to countries like Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Rwanda, and Malawi. The coffee available for purchase is also from all of these places, in a variety of flavors.

            TOMS has also done a pretty good job of marketing with social media. They have a presence on all of the major social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. Pinterest is a really important platform to be on for an organization like TOMS because they can upload pictures of their products, and users can pin what products they think they would like to buy. If they click on the pin, it will link directly to the TOMS website where they can buy the product. It just makes it that much easier for the user.

            TOMS also uses Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to post images of their products, but they also promote events like Day Without Shoes, which spreads awareness for the cause. They also post videos and pictures of people delivering the shoes to children in need and the children enjoying their new shoes. This kind of marketing is affective in pulling at people’s heartstrings and getting them to donate to the organization. I’m interested to see how they will continue to use social media to promote the new coffee/water initiative.

MIT Students Use GIFs to Teach Computers Emotion

            There is a Mashable article called “MIT Students Use GIFs to Teach Computers Emotion,” which tells the story of two MIT graduate students who created a website called GIFGIF, which presents users two gifs, and they have to choose which one better expresses a certain emotion. The user can sort through different emotions like guilt, happiness, amusement, etc. and pick the gif they think describes that emotion. There are about 4,000 gifs programmed into the site.

            This project was created by Kevin Hu and Travis Rich in order to develop a way for computers to better understand emotions. This technology will be used to translate small portions of text into gifs, like Shakespeare sonnets. I’m not really sure what this will be used for. Perhaps to better understand literature?

            Another potential use of the project is a way of understanding the differences between different cultures of reading emotions. This would be impactful for people to learn different cultures and understand that not everyone interprets the world in the same way. This could be useful in international business and political spheres.

            I tried out the GIFGIF website, and it’s pretty fun in a simple way. Some of the gifs don’t really have anything to do with the emotion presented, so I’m grateful that there is a “neither” option. It is an interesting experience knowing that you are helping improve a technology and teaching computers to learn emotions.

The Hashtag

            Hashtags. Whether you love them or hate them they have become integrated into the culture of social media, and I doubt they’re going away soon. I found a Mashable article a while ago that discussed “Hashtag Etiquette.” Who knew we would need to know such a thing?

            Some of the examples of people using hashtags the wrong way include having too many hashtags in a post, saying “hashtag” in real life, and using Facebook hashtags. I remember when Facebook first released hashtags on Facebook, and users either groaned or started using them gladly. I wouldn’t say I was on the groaning side, but I definitely think that hashtags are Twitter’s territory. They are a nice utility to use when you want to describe something in a concise way, and in the Twitter world of 140 characters, it’s very useful.

            I know that Facebook gets a bad rep for stealing ideas from Twitter (which I think some are debatable), but Facebook blatantly took the hashtag concept from Twitter. They did not even try to change the idea a little and make it their own. That just seems lazy to me. For that reason and others, I don’t think I will ever use hashtags on Facebook.

            On Twitter, however, I do use the occasional hashtag to make a point or to create a little more humor in my tweets. I only use one or two hashtags, though. Overusing hashtags is one of my pet peeves. When the hashtags become longer than the actual tweet, you are using too many.

            It’s also a little strange that young kids these days only refer to the # symbol as a hashtag. Today I had to activate my new debit card over the phone and I had to enter my card number followed by the pound sign. When those kids grow up, they won’t even know what that means, and that’s a little weird to think about.