In defense of the selfie
Two years ago I launched Twitter and Instagram accounts for @FatherMarquette, the namesake of Marquette University.
Historically, Father Marquette was a 17th century Jesuit who canoed the Mississippi and explored the Midwest. So I wanted him to stay true to his roots when we resurrected him in social media.
The idea was Father Marquette would continue exploring his surroundings. I used the hashtag #MUExplore to showcase what Milwaukee offers.
These accounts gave me more freedom to share photos of campus and beyond. Father Marquette could break out of the institutional voice and have some fun.
The concept made sense on paper. But something was missing.
His face.
Sure, Father Marquette had a profile pic, but the photos shared on his account lacked personality. There was nothing that distinguished his photos from anyone else’s.
Then I stumbled on an old statuette of Father Marquette (long story) that I introduced into his photos. I played off his deadpan expression and made it part of his persona.
That’s when his accounts really took off.
Basically, Father Marquette started communicating through selfies. Father Marquette put a face to our social media.
It also let him expand his reach into Snapchat, where people essentially communicate through selfies. My intern Cesar created this one:
Non-verbals — in particular facial expressions — have always been important way for our species to communicate.
This was confirmed by a recent study of 1.1 million Instagram photos by Georgia Tech and Yahoo Labs to see what attracted the most engagement.
The results? Researchers found that photos of human faces are 38% more likely to receive likes and 32% more likely to attract comments.
Put simply, people respond to faces in social media.
“Even as babies, people love to look at faces,” said Saeideh Bakhshi, a Georgia Tech College of Computing Ph.D. student who led the study. “We constantly monitor them for a variety of contexts, including attractiveness, emotions and identity.”
And social media is no different.
Sometimes it just takes analytics to confirm something we already know.
