The social media app Instagram is always coming up with new and innovative updates to keep itself at the number one spot. While some Instagram updates have made our lives easy, especially for the influencers for whom marketing brands and products on the social media platforms is the biggest earning source. And some updates have not done well with everyone. Like giving the reel button prominence in the status tab, last didn’t go down well with many people as they didn’t want Instagram to go the Tik-Tok way. In order to fight the competition as the app was gaining popularity with the younger generation world-over, they had to get into Reels.
Same way, this year, keeping in mind the pandemic situation and how it is affecting the mental health of everyone, the latest Instagram update 2021 will not show the number of likes a particular post has garnered.
Why is the influencer not happy?
The same update was proposed in 2019, too, as the likes number is an important tool for any celebrity or influencer to get bigger and better marketing deals. Many influencers didn’t accept this new update. As it is an important algorithm to keep track of engagement on the post, and removing it will impact how users react to the post, the influencer community is not happy with this development.
Why Instagram did what it did?
As per Facebook (owners of Instagram), they wanted to make Instagram more friendly and less judgmental. As world over, we have seen many cases of online bullying, trolling, and negativity, which is rising. They believe that hiding like will make the user share posts that they like without feeling conscious or thinking about their impacts in terms of numbers but rather in terms of positive influence. This is meant to create a more positive environment online. They also want to remove the pressure to achieve a certain number of likes on a post, which has been eating away many people personally.
How does it affect the influencer?
For the influencer, the number of likes is in direct correlation with the money they can charge for marketing a product. It acts as a validation for the work they put in to design a post in the best possible way to market a brand or a product. With the hiding of the number of likes, they may have to rely on other algorithms to decide on the veracity of the posts.
The more the number of likes, the more the post will be pushed forward by the algorithms. Hence with hiding these numbers, the influencer is already experiencing a fall in the number of likes on their posts, which makes it difficult for the posts to reach new audiences.
This also creates problems for brands, advertising, and marketing agencies who can not see the numbers to judge the efficacy of the post and the clout of the influencer. They may have to ask for regular updates from the influencer, which before was just a matter of keeping track of the number of likes on the posts.
To Shift base to other social media apps
The rising popularity of Tik-Toks will push the influencer to shift their base to the new app. The guys at Tik-Tok are already providing a platform to them to make content and market their brand association as they generate an audience for them.
What's next?
The brands may think in terms of the loyalty and trustworthiness of the audience, with regards to the influencers and not just the number of likes on a post. This may lead to a better engagement, which is, in turn, beneficial to both the brands and influencers. Maybe the removal of likes will help them understand this aspect better, which in turn will lead to better engagement.
Likes are not the only measure in the algorithms of Instagram; there is the number of followers, engagement rate, comments, and insights about save and reach will give them a better outlook about posts. Although this update may not be acceptable to many, it does create other avenues to check and gauge the popularity of a post.