Social media: Instagram tries dropping the scoreboard
Would Instagram really be the same without the “Like” button? asked Mariel Padilla in The New York Times. We may soon find out: The Facebook-owned, photocentric social network began testing that change in Canada this spring and recently expanded the experiment to six more countries, hiding the public count of likes and video views to make the experience “less competitive, less pressurized, and more personal.” Users can still see how many likes they received on their own posts, but there won’t be a public tally to measure your achievement. One category of Instagram users is exempt from the change, said Cara Waters in The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia): businesses and advertisers, who pay to promote their products and posts in the Instagram app. They’ll still have visible likes, a signal to users that a post is popular and clickworthy. In effect, “the ‘like economy’ becomes a premium product for businesses.”
If Instagram does drop like counts, professional influencers will need to change their tactics, said Megan Graham in CNBC.com. They’ll have a tougher time convincing companies that they are worth a sponsorship. “Marketers will still be able to look at an influencer’s follower count, but that metric doesn’t mean much in the way of showing how ‘engaged’ a user’s audience is.” This could force influencers to produce higherquality content—compelling enough that it will actually drive viewers to make a purchase. Brands will rely more on tools that can “determine whether clicking from an Instagram post converts to an actual sale, or whether the consumer actually goes to buy that product.”
Sorry, I’m not buying that Instagram’s motive for hiding likes is “to protect their users from vanity metrics,” said Dakota Shane in Inc. “The move is clearly meant to increase advertising dollars by killing off the Instagram influencer marketing industry,” and perhaps to appease advertisers by making content posts more engaging. It actually makes sound business sense: Instagram doesn’t get a cut from the influencer industry, so it wants to “entice brands to allocate budget to Instagram ads instead.”
Let’s say you give Instagram the benefit of the doubt—it does seem to be undertaking this test “for a good cause,” said Rae Witte in The Wall Street Journal. But this could backfire. A like helps users “determine the quality of a post,” with “the most photogenic cream rising to the top.” Losing that won’t solve Instagram’s problems with cyberbullying and competitive consumption. But it will make it harder to discover new things, “removing the heart of the platform.”