Not getting enough “likes” on your Instagram photos? Maybe it’s because your pictures are not blue enough. A new study carried out by Philadelphia-based research company Curalate has concluded why some pictures on the photo-sharing social site receive more attention than the others, and how people can improve their chances of getting “likes.”

The analytics firm eight million Instagram posts against 30 image parameters, allowing it to pinpoint the likeability factors of a photo. It came up with tips on how to get more people to like a post.

As enumerated by the Daily Mail, the first factor that helps boost the popularity of an image is colour dominance. Photos in which one colour in particular dominates an image got 40 per cent more likes than images with multiple colours.

Perhaps it’s because one-colour images are rare, as Curalate found 90 per cent of the images it has analysed failed to have dominant colours.

But even what colour dominates an image has an impact. Images with predominant blue tint received 24 per cent more likes than images with other predominant colours, such as red or orange.

Should you decide to make your Instagram photo predominantly blue, make sure that the colour takes more than 20 per cent of the screen as well.

Also, don’t crop in images too closely. Posts with a high proportion of background space received 29 per cent more likes, according to the study.

Make your photos “textured” and lighter. Highly textured images were more popular than flatter pictures by about 80 per cent, while lighter photos got more likes than those that were darker by 24 per cent.

As per the study, the lightness level for a picture is ideally between 65 and 80 per cent. Those that fall into the mentioned brightness range were almost 25 per cent more popular than photos with 0 to 45 per cent lightness.

Instagram has 20 different filters, and these also influenced the popularity of the photos in the study. Filters like “Walden” and “Rise” drain the colour from photos deliberately, and photos with such low saturation received 18 per cent more likes than those that use more vibrant filters such has “Hefe” and “Kelvin.”

Also, if you want your followers to share your images, upload your Instagram photo via the Twitter app. Avoid sharing it directly from Instagram.

To sum it up, your Instagram photo has more chances of getting likes if it is 1) predominantly blue, 2) with recognisable background (not cropped too closely), 3) bright, 4) has mild saturation level, and 5) shared via Twitter.

Perhaps something that looks like this: