A landmark paper reveals the future of social media marketing analysis and quantifies the impact of images on engagement.

1. Is a picture on social
media worth a thousand
words?
Fiona Case, Content Marketing, UCSD
November 2021

2. Two professors tested this
long held assumption
Yiyi Li, assistant professor of marketing at the
University of Texas at Arlington, USA
Ying Xie, associate professor of marketing
at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Their paper, first published in 2019, is the most read article in the American Marketing
Association’s Journal of Marketing Research. It was the first to quantify the impact of
image content on social media.

3. Their paper highlights best practices in analysis of
social media data, the use of supervised learning
algorithms to code text content and the use of
deep learning models to extract information from
image data.

4. The study considers three different
scenarios
• Mere presence – you just need a picture, any picture, to
catch people’s attention.
• Image characteristics – you need a good picture. The study
considers colorfulness, the presence of human face and
emotional state and image quality.
• Image–text fit – you need a relevant picture, something that
helps people to understand the topic of the post.

5. Lots of data!
• 14,959 tweets mentioning at least one of the ten leading compact sport
utility vehicle models
• 18,790 tweets mentioning at least one of the nine major U.S. airlines
• 2,044 Instagram photos posted concerning the same nine airlines

6. Computer (AI): Real people:
Is there an image? How good is the image?
(esthetic value)
How colorful is the image? Is the image relevant to the
topic of the post?
Sentiment of the text (positive
or negative)
Presence and mood of a face
(happy or not)
It is remarkable that a computer can do this!

7. Results
• The mere presence of an image always helps a tweet to receive more likes
and retweets
• Increase of 87.26% likes and 119.15% retweets for the air travel posts, 151.56%
likes and 213.12% retweets for SUV posts
• High-quality pictures always lead to more engagement
• Pictures with a human face and pictures relevant to the text content
induce more sharing and liking on Twitter, they do not affect engagement
on Instagram

8. Analysis
• Instagram was created to share pictures. Image quality is critical – the text is
less important.
• Twitter was created to share news and status updates. Most tweets do not
even include an image. When they do it needs to be a picture that relevant to
the news being shared, or a photo of a person that is relevant to the status
update.
• Adding a picture to a twitter post may not be worth 1000 words (assuming an
average of 5 characters per word that would be at least 18 more tweets) – but
a 200% increase in retweets is definitely worth the effort!

9. Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? An Empirical Study
of Image Content and Social Media Engagement,
Yiyi Li and Ying Xie, Journal of Marketing Research, 57(1),
1-19, 2020.
This paper provides a robust statistical analysis that takes
marketing decision making beyond assumptions and
provides practical insights for Twitter and Instagram.
You should read it!