Instagram Revokes the Vanity Counter
The company says it’s reducing pressure on influencers. But it’s also making Instagram a stronger platform for commerce.
This week Instagram broadened a test to stop showing the number of likes each post has. It’s now in seven countries — Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand.
The company spin is they’re doing this for the mental health of aspiring influencers. The head of Instagram told Buzzfeed it’s about “creating a less pressurized environment where people feel comfortable expressing themselves.” A director for Facebook, which owns Instagram, said they want to “remove the pressure of how many likes a post will receive, so you can focus on sharing the things you love.”
That’s part of the story, but let’s not kid ourselves: The like counter has been bad for business. As a shorthand measure of how good a post is, it makes sense. But in reality, Instagram users have been hacking their like counts from the start. They do stunt-posts to run up likes. They remove posts that don’t get enough to look influential. They’ve turned their accounts into bots to add bogus likes in search of endorsement deals, business leads, or modeling contracts.
Even for legit counts, marketers and advertisers have their own number, and it’s the one that matters: Conversions. How many people bought, visited, or signed up for the thing they’re promoting? At this point, they’re exasperated with poor returns on their influencer spending. A post with a zillion likes is often a hottie photo or crazy stunt that gets widely shared, but doesn’t get people to buy the sneakers.
Most of all, this is part of a move toward Instagram as a platform for commerce, not just influencer marketing. Where Facebook itself has flailed, Instagram has the potential to become the place where people go to buy things. If the number of likes and the number of sales don’t match, it’s not a sustainable system. To drive commerce, Instagram needs to get influencers to focus not on their popularity, but on their proven conversion power.
All Instagram has done with this change is stop telling viewers how many likes each post has. Influencers can still see their own counts, and see exactly who they are. Twitter has shown the way for tools that let users determine whether each of those is a human being or a bot.
I empathize with influencers who worry they’ll lose their audiences or their income. But the sad truth is that too often, we share a post only if or because it already has a lot of likes, not because we were personally wowed by it. That’s bad for conversions, therefore it’s bad for business, and ultimately it’s bad for you thumbing through Instagram — by posting and sharing what’s most like-clicked instead of what we actually like, we’re spamming ourselves.
There’s another term that matters in business: Brand trust. People won’t buy and sellers won’t sell in a marketplace they think is sketchy — fake likes, weak conversions. Facebook already has one brand people don’t trust. They can’t afford two. Instagram’s move to banish the Like is a bid to strengthen its brand trust as a platform for commerce, but they’re right about this: It might help us focus on sharing the things we love.
