Relationship Between Facial Features and Engagement in Young Women’s Posts on Instagram

We conducted a survey on what types of photos are likely to obtain “likes,” a form of engagement, from young female users on Instagram. In this study, we examined the relationships between the presence or absence of a face in a photo and its physical attractiveness, the degree of smiling, the presence or absence of facial editing, text length, the number of tags, and the number of “likes” (likes) for each category of photos (hereafter, contexts). The contexts included “coming-of-age ceremony,” “graduation ceremony,” “café,” and “domestic travel.” We collected 200 Instagram posts for each context and assigned the above features manually or with a computer program. A correlation analysis and tests of representative values for the two groups were performed on these data. The results showed that photos that included the poster’s face received more likes in the contexts other than the graduation ceremony. In the graduation ceremony and café contexts, more likes were obtained when physical attractiveness was high. The obtained likes for the coming-of-age ceremony; the café; and, to a lesser extent, the graduation ceremony were lower for those with facial editing.