It's common knowledge that setting one's profile picture on Facebook is a thoughtful process, at least among the demographic of teenagers and young adults such as myself. For most, producing the perfect profile picture serves the purpose of collecting "likes," supposedly a tell-tale measure of one's "popularity," or more realistically, a consequence of what has become an autonomous response to an endless stream of media consumption.
However, operating on the assumption that the number of "likes" that a profile pictures receives is a reliable indicator of viral content. I hypothesize that the majority, if not all, of popular profile picture content falls under four categories: individual portrait, group portrait (2 or more people), action shot, and object/abstract photo/illustration. Anything else that does not fall under these four categories will be labelled as miscellaneous. In order to pinpoint popular profile pictures, I only consider the most "popular" profile picture: that is, the profile picture with the most likes.
I selected my profile pictures by going through my Facebook friends and selected every 7th profile, since Facebook seems to order friends based on how often you interact with them. Then, I sorted them into folders based on the above categories. After going through all of my friends, taking inspiration from another project, I pasted the pictures from each of the categories into Word, enlarging and shrinking them based on how many likes they received (rounding down to the closest factor of five and dividing by five). This gives me the below collages:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the individual portrait category dominates in both number of likes and sheer number, as 27 out of my 50 picture sample fell into this category. Of these photos, the more "likable" pictures often appear scripted and shot with professional lighting and equipment. In many cases, the main subject is off-center or looking elsewhere, giving the entire picture a more sophisticated feel than a selfie. In other words, it goes against the "norm" of conventional self portraits. Other popular picks include photos that reveal a spunky personality: a funny face or gesture or a distinct sense of style.
The second most highly liked yet smallest category would be the action shots, of which the most popular photos still tend to be scripted and professionally shot. Other "likable" photos in this category include extreme sports, candid shots with animals, and light effects. The relatively small number in this category likely reflects the difficulty of capturing a quality action shot.
The next category that lands second in terms of quantity is the group portraits, with 11 photos. Although these portraits are less popular than the active shots, they seem more common among Facebook users. In this case, the outlier seems to be the large group photo, which, surprisingly, garnered the most likes. This is unexpected, as large group photos tend to "impersonalize" the subject; the more unfamiliar people there are, the less of a connection to the photo one experiences. As expected, however, the remaining group photos tend to include an individual and his/her significant other, family member, or close friend. The purpose of these pictures is often to evoke a feeling of kinship or perhaps cater to what seems to be a pervasive yearning to know about others' relationships.
Finally, the object/abstract photos/illustrations category, with 8 items, seems to be the least popular category among the four. Unless it is a recognizable concept, most of these pictures are misunderstood or go unnoticed.