Trends Q: Do square photos get more Facebook engagement than portrait or landscape?

Between the mobile app, desktop website, and a fixed-width news feed, the orientation of a photo can have a small but important impact on how it appears to the viewer. With square gaining popularity in recent years compared to traditional landscape and portrait orientations, is there any correlation between these layouts and engagement?

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 30,000 photos shared to over 600 hotel and resort Facebook pages during the last 9 months. We grouped them by their orientation and found the average like, comment, and share rate for each group. For example, here’s how those orientations might look on mobile:

And here are the results.

For every engagement type landscape orientation came out on top followed by square and then portrait. Landscape received 23% more likes and 28% more shares than portrait while comment rate remained fairly consistent across all three which is a trend we’ve seen before.

What This Means
While there are many factors at play within how Facebook displays images, it may come to something as straightforward as biology because humans see in landscape mode (very close to a 4:3 ratio, in fact). Perhaps it’s a matter of the photo matching how we’re used to seeing the world.

Does it mean that posting the same subject in landscape mode will result in more like? Maybe. And while it may not quite be that simple, it’s an interesting data set with intriguing implications.

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