In social media’s attention economy “likes” are currency; photos showing faces attract more “likes.” Previous research has established a left cheek bias in photos uploaded to social media, but whether left cheek poses induce more engagement than right cheek poses remains to be determined. The present study thus examined whether pose orientation influences the number of “likes” and comments garnered by photos uploaded to Instagram. The top 20 single-user Instagram accounts were identified, and the most recent 10 left and 10 right cheek images were selected, resulting in a total of 400 images. The number of “likes” and comments were tallied for each image, netting over 1 billion “likes” and 14 million comments for analysis. Results confirmed that pose orientation influences audience engagement: left cheek poses garner >10% more “likes” than right cheek poses. Gender did not influence “likes”. Comments were not affected by either pose orientation or gender, likely reflecting the different levels of effort and motivations involved in “liking” vs. commenting on an image. These data indicate that a seemingly inconsequential turn of the head profoundly impacts audience engagement: left cheek poses gained >330,000 more “likes”, offering clear implications for marketers and others in the social media economy.

在社交媒体的关注中，经济“喜欢”是货币；显示面孔的照片会吸引更多“喜欢”。先前的研究已经在上传到社交媒体的照片中建立了左脸偏斜度，但是尚需确定左脸颊偏斜姿势是否比右脸颊偏斜吸引更多的人。因此，本研究检查了姿势取向是否会影响上传到Instagram的照片所产生的“喜欢”和评论数量。确定了排名前20位的单用户Instagram帐户，并选择了最近的10张左脸和10张右脸颊图像，总共产生了400张图像。计算每张图片的“喜欢”和评论数量，扣除10亿“喜欢”和1400万评论用于分析。结果证实，姿势取向会影响观众的参与度：左脸颊姿势会增加> 比右脸颊姿势多“喜欢” 10％。性别没有影响“喜欢”。评论不受姿势取向或性别的影响，很可能反映了“喜欢”与评论图片所涉及的不同努力程度和动机。这些数据表明，看似无关紧要的头转向对听众的参与产生了深远影响：左脸颊姿势获得了“超过33万”的“喜欢”，这对营销人员和社交媒体经济中的其他人有着明显的影响。