why is facebook blue
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
WHY IS FACEBOOK BLUE? THE SCIENCE BEHIND COLORS IN
MARKETING
Babu Appat
TURN OUT, SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS TWEAKING THE COLOR OF A BUTTON
CHANGES USER BEHAVIOR OR ENDEARS PEOPLE TO YOUR PRODUCT.
Yes Of course
BUFFER'S LEO WIDRICH EXPLAINS THE IMPORTANCE OF COLOR IN WEBSITE AND
BRAND DESIGN
Yes Of course
LEMME TRY TO EXPLAIN THE IMPORTANCE OF COLOUR IN
WEBSITE AND BRAND DESIGN
According to The New Yorker
the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green color blind; blue is the color Mark can see the best.
Not highly scientific, right?
That may not be the case for Facebook,
but there are some amazing examples of how colours actually affect our purchasing decisions.
It’s only natural
that 90% of an assessment for trying out a product is made by colour alone
So how do colours really affect us?
and what is the science of colors in marketing, really?
Let’s dig into some of the latest, most interesting research on it.
First: Can you recognize the online brands just based on color?
Before we dive into the research
here are some awesome experiments that show you how powerful colour alone really is.
Based on just the colours
of the buttons, can you guess which company belongs to each of
them?
Awesome
These examples from YouTube designer
Marc Hemeon, show the real power of colour
more than any study could.
babu
appa
t@gm
ail.c
om
It’s a bit ambiguous
Being completely conscious about what color triggers us to think in which way isn’t always
obvious. [email protected]
LOGO
The Logo Company has come up with an amazing breakdown which
colors are best for which
companies and why. babu
appa
t@gm
ail.c
om
And the Fourth
I would like to show you a co-relation between colour and emotions
When we feel compelled to buy somethin..
colour can play a major
role.
Analytics
company KISSmetrics created
an amazing infographic on the science of how colors affect our
purchases.
For further research:
The role of green stands out to
me as the most relaxing colour we can use to make
buying easier.
Most companies didn’t
intentionally choose this as the main colour although it
seems to have worked very well so far.
At second look, we also
realized how frequently black
is used for luxury products.
I’ll show you the full infographic:
How to improve your marketing with better use of colors:
This all might be fairly entertaining,
but what are some actual decisions we can apply today
to a website or app?
If you are building an app that mainly targets women, experts
suggest that women love blue, purple, and green, and dislike
orange, brown, and gray
In case your app is strictly
targeting men, the rules of the game are
slightly different.
Men love blue, green, and black, but can do without brown,
orange, and purple. [email protected]
In another experiment,
Performable (now HubSpot) wanted to find out whether simply
changing the colour of a button would make a difference to
conversion rates.
They started out with the simple hypothesis of choosing between
two colours (green and red) and trying guess what would happen.
Green connotes ideas like “natural” and “environment,” and given its wide use in traffic lights,
suggests the idea of “go” or forward movement.
The colour red, on the other hand, is often thought to communicate
excitement, passion, blood, and warning.
It is also used as the colour for
stopping at traffic lights. Red
is also known to be eye-catching.”
So, clearly an A/B test between
green and red would result in green, the more friendly colour.
At least that was their guess.
So how did that experiment turn out?
The answer was surprising:
The red button
outperformed the green button by 21%.
21% more people clicked on the
red button than on the green button. Everything else on the pages
was the same, so it was only the button colour that made this difference.
This definitely made me wonder: If we were to read all the research
before this experiment and ask every researcher which version they would guess would perform better, I’m sure
green would be the answer in nearly all cases.
Not so much. [email protected]
While the results weren’t as clear, we still saw a huge change.
One hypothesis is that for a social media sharing tool, there is less of a barrier to signup, which makes
the differences less significant
Despite all the studies, generalizations are extremely hard
to make.
Whatever change you make, treat
it first as a hypothesis, and see if the actual experiment supports
your ideas. [email protected]
People are always very prone to go with opinion.
Yet, data always beats opinion, no matter what.
Quick last fact: Why are hyperlinks blue?
This is something that always is of great interest and
is actually a fun story.
In short, it offers the highest contrast between the colours used on early websites.
Tim Berners-Lee, the main inventor of the web, is believed to be the man
who first made hyperlinks blue. Mosaic, a very early web
browser, displayed webpages with a (ugly) gray background and
black text.
The darkest color available at the time that was easily
distinguishable from the black text was that blue color.
Therefore, to make links stand apart from plain text, but still be
readable, the colour blue was selected.
Since then, the blue colour for links has stayed for the most part
