The Secret to Get More Instagram Likes Revealed by Science

If you want to get more Instagram likes, science is on your side with two tips that can turn two or three likes into a dozen.

You don’t need to get a thousand more followers to get more Instagram likes, you just need to change what you post and how often you post.

A new scientific study, yes scientific study of Instagram, found that if you take an Instagram photo with your face in it, you’ll get more likes and comments.

Instagram is a social network for photo sharing that is currently owned by Facebook. Users post square photos to Instagram with filters and tags which show up on a newsfeed in the Instagram app on iPhone and Android, and users can post them to Facebook and Twitter as well.

The study from Georgia Tech, shared on Mashable, took a random 1.1 million Instagram photos and used face detection software to uncover that Instagram photos with a face are 38% more likely to get likes and 32% more likely to get comments.

Why are faces in Instagram photos more attractive to other users? According to Saeideh Bakhshi of Georgia Tech, “We are social animals and want to see other people — it’s comforting to us and makes us safe. This is engrained in us at a very early age, when babies are looking for the support of their parents.”

If only Bradley's arm was longer. Best photo ever. #oscars pic.twitter.com/C9U5NOtGap

— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) March 3, 2014

Of course this doesn’t factor in wether or not you are attractive, which has to help with likes and comments. The study found that age, gender and the number of faces in the Instagram photo didn’t make a difference, though adding Ellen and Jared Leto would probably help.

The second thing you need to do to get more Instagram likes is a little counterintuitive. The researchers found that you shouldn’t post Instagram photos as often if you want more likes. Bakhshi told Mashable, “The more Instagram pictures you post, the more people lose interest.”

While you may be tempted to share a lot of Instagram photos every day, or to batch post all your photos at once, you’ll get more likes and more engagement by spacing the photos out and taking small breaks between posts.

Just like you don’t want to see 50 photos of one person you follow cluttering up your timeline, others don’t want to see the same thing. If you want to get more likes and comments on Facebook you could also apply this advice to posting there.