ACTIVATE’s Take: Instagram Testing Hiding “Likes” in the United States
Months after Instagram tested hiding “like” counts on the platform in Canada, Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand, CEO Adam Mosseri announced at WIRED25 that they will be testing this with select accounts in the United States. This means that certain users can expect their like counts to vanish from public view.
What does ACTIVATE think?
CEO of ACTIVATE, Nick DiSanto hopes this change results in more authentic engagement metrics, as removal of likes will also remove the impact of social ‘pile on’ when something is a fad or going viral for no good reason. Instead, he anticipates the change will put an emphasis and value on high quality content versus what’s #trending. ACTIVATE anticipates that “likes” will certainly still continue to power the algorithm and any impact this change has directly on the algorithm should be largely positive. DiSanto explains,
“We believe people should ‘like’ content because they truly like it, not because everyone else is ‘liking it’. If the premise behind Instagram’s hypothesis is similar to this notion and ultimately correct, then accounts with large follower counts should expect to see decrease engagement, while smaller accounts that share truly premium or engaging content should expect to see a rise. It will be interesting to see if Instagram shares any insight on these tests publicly, or if major changes to the platform incur as a result of said insights.”
Lauren McGrath, VP of ACTIVATE Studio, believes that influencer engagement is a less relevant metric than it once was in assessing an influencer’s power, saying,
“As we’ve seen brand objectives move down funnel, we’ve placed increasingly more emphasis on traffic and conversion-driving initiatives for our influencer campaigns. Our team has seen that a an influx of ‘likes’ does not always equate to lots of sales, and when assessing prospective influencers we are starting to look past engagement and dive deeper into clickthrough rate, audience sentiment, and conversion history.”
Instagram has extensive experience launching phased rollouts of new features, A/B testing any changes before official release to ensure they are achieving the desired effect.
What’s inspiring this test?
Considering the incredible exercises Instagram has taken to keep its user base safe AND considering the reality that today’s society is a social media society, where people are measured and judged by the amount of likes and comments they can amass online, it leads one to wonder…
Is Instagram hiding likes and ultimately changing their platform a test to see if they can change our culture for the better?
On October 29th, 2019, Instagram published an article to their Press Center titled “Taking More Steps to Keep The People Who Use Instagram Safe”, which outlines the efforts they’ve taken to cut back on suicide and self-harm content on the platform.
On October 2nd, 2019, Instagram published an article to their Press Center titled “Empowering Our Community to Stand up to Bullying”, which outlines the efforts they’ve taken to counteract cyberbullying on the platform.
How do these changes affect the ACTIVATE platform?
At this time, we have no updates from the developer team at Instagram as to how this change could impact access to any metrics via the API. Influencers and users whose likes are not publicly shown during this test will still have access to privately view their analytics, as they always have. ACTIVATE will certainly update its clients if and when this change impacts our platform and the metrics we have access to in any way.
