Which filter will make your brand's photos more popular on social media?

According to a new study of the ways photographers apply filters to the images they post online, certain types of filters tend to catalyse more comments, while others can boost popularity.

The most compelling conclusions for marketers, drawn from analysis of 7.6 million photos uploaded to Flickr between late 2012 and mid-2013 — either through its mobile app (3.5 million) or through Instagram (4.1 million) — include:

• Overall, photos with filters are 21% more likely to be looked at than non-filtered photos and 45% more likely to elicit comments.
• The filters most likely to boost images’ popularity are those “that impose warm color temperature, boost contrast, and increase exposure.”
• Filters that effect the saturation of a photo inexplicably have a small and negative impact on the number of views, but a positive impact on the number of comments garnered.
• Filters that give an image an aged look — your sepia-tone and black-and-white filters, for instance — boost the number of views while decreasing images’ chances of garnering comments.