Instagram “Likes” is obsolete, create your own unique metric

It seems that Instagram finally agrees with my thinking that the ‘number of “Likes”’ is not an important metric for everyone to know, but enough for the account holder to know. While the removal of public likes was implemented to “remove pressure” and enhance mental health, so that people can focus more on posting what they love the most, instead of “wanting to be liked”, I consider Likes to be more of a self-admiration or a vanity metric because it doesn’t completely measure why those posts resonated, and doesn’t really tell if it achieved a goal– be it marketing, targeting, or engagement in a broader sense.

To thrive in this new personalized digital age, where Millennial and Gen Z want realistic, authentic and raw content, your social media strategy needs to transform, as Instagram says goodbye to public likes.

Likes started off as a false currency, and a convenient number to serve as a performance metric. Besides, it is a known fact that social media likes can be bought to inflate its numbers. Now, with the removal of Likes, businesses are forced to figure out what content is actually working, and supporting its goals. Businesses need to innovate new strategy models, become creative at analyzing data and get to the specifics, as Instagram makes its move towards de-prioritising Likes to change the way its algorithm works — focusing more on content that gathers meaningful actions from viewers more than just Likes.

Here’s how you can possibly engineer your brand’s Instagram strategy model:

Weighing metrics depending on your campaign objectives

Instead of merely adding up Likes, Comments, Shares, and Saves, it is important to prioritize or weigh each metric (maybe on a scale from 0 to 1, or 1 to 10) depending on your business goal. A business goal that may require increased action from your audience in terms of Saves, should assign a higher weight to Saves than the rest of the metrics. These are then used as a multiplier for your corresponding engagement metric number.

For example, assuming you get the following engagements on a post: 1,100 Likes, 80 Comments, 70 Shares, and 150 Saves. On assigning weights to each of the metrics you signify its relative importance to one another, and to your goal: 0.1 for Likes, 0.2 for Comments, 0.3 for Shares, and 0.4 for Saves. On reading further, you’ll understand why I have assigned the weights for the metrics in that particular order. You can then get the weighted average as the product of the two numbers, and get to the new metric that takes into account the importance of each metric. Now your new engagement metrics will be: 110 Likes, 16 Comments, 21 Shares and 60 Saves.

A quick look into the numbers shows that although the number of comments are higher than the number of shares in this case, the weighted average indicates that Shares have higher value than that of Comments, because it takes into account the importance of each metric into the overall number. It means that for your business goal, it is important to gather more shares than comments, as each share holds a larger value than each comment on an average.

Automating this for every post will give you an overall picture of your brand’s engagement, and better compare the performance of each metric with one another to keep track of your goals.

Adopt an engagement funnel

Deep dive to plan and strategize your content creation by noting down the ways in which your followers engage with different content. This will direct you to determine what type of content and experiences are worth investing in to achieve your goal.

To me, Saves and Shares look promising (in that order) to better determine the overall success of your desired goal, as it gives insights into the real action from viewers. While both Saves and Likes show that the content is valuable, it is important to look beyond the numbers alone. A “Like” takes the least amount of effort from the viewer. Think about it — an automatic double tap and a consequent scroll does not effectively indicate whether they consumed the content in its caption, or paid attention to the post. If somebody likes your content enough to Save it for revisiting it in future, that’s a pretty big indication of great quality, and subsequent sharing, liking and possibly commenting.

Save is the equivalent of a bookmark that lets you come back to the post later. And in this digital age where content is flooded every second and 1 billion people use Instagram every month, photos tend to have a limited shelf life of about 3 days in the “Explore” tab which explains why Save is the most important metric from a broader perspective of engagement — relevance, reference, and usability.

Hence I would rank Save as the highest or highly weighted metric for measuring your overall goal.

It is therefore important to look beyond Likes and mere summation of the engagement metrics, and proactively adopt an engagement funnel. My Instagram engagement priority order/funnel (least important to most important) would look like this –

Likes. I “Like” a lot of content on Instagram, it is temporary and disappears from my feed without an easy traceability. A like means a simple “I like this photo” — could be the person in it, or the colours, maybe the place, or perhaps the overall composition, but not good enough for me to revisit it again.

Comments. If something is catchy and deserves appreciation, I comment on the post, complimenting the idea, showing my support, or sharing my opinion, mostly on posts of people that I like.

Shares. If I like something and find the caption or the picture interesting and useful, and I trust the content, I will share it, thus increasing the reach of the post (e.g. sharing publicly useful information on a current situation that could be helpful, or sharing privately with my friends of a post with great pictures of locations that helps in planning out our upcoming trip)

Saves. If I really love what I see, I will spend some time to read the caption, and save the post in my collections, because I find it relevant to me, and I don’t want to lose it. I want to revisit the post again at my convenience and use the idea from it. (e.g. a healthy diet or exercise plan, design inspiration for jewellry for an upcoming event, etc.)

Don’t you do the same?

This engagement funnel can be modified based on what you’re looking to achieve. However, it is important to create a similar funnel to measure your marketing efforts the right way.

Each engagement funnel is unique to your goal

It is noteworthy to mention that in most campaigns, Saves and Shares, share about the same level of importance in terms of engagement which take different forms for different purposes and intent — Saves for Relevance and Reference, and Shares for Trust, both of which enables in increasing your reach and subsequent engagements.

Similarly, you might rank comments higher than the rest. Most comments goes by the likes of “great shot”, “lovely”, “goals”, etc. while some comments are detailed about your product or creation such as art, food, or fashion. If you are looking for a different route to establish brand authenticity by motivating your audience to talk and enquire about your brand publicly, you can do so by jumping in and participating in the conversation.

Use “Likes”as an “enabler” to create new content

A quick engagement double tap action such as a like should not be dismissed entirely, but must be placed at the top of your funnel and be used to determine which posts resonate for a quick action. By using number of Likes along with the one other engagement metric that matters the most to your goal, you can evaluate how your posts compare to each other. This gives you a better shot at creating new content, or reposting or repackaging old content to give your audience what it wants.

But moving on, stop using Likes as the sole key metric, for your social media strategy and tracking your business goals.

It is important to understand that social media strategy and tracking business goals is a feedback-iterative process — your social media strategy needs to go through iterations from the feedback that it receives from your tracking with the engagement funnel.

By adopting this strategy, you’ll see who amongst your “like only” group is interacting with your brand in more meaningful ways that increases your brand’s content consumption at various points in time through saves, and increases your brand’s visibility through increased shares and comments.

Likes on Instagram is now passé. The “like economy” on social media should be justified by commercial gain, and the primary currency of social media is moving towards creativity and authenticity. Even if influencers received a daunting amount of Likes for a post advertising a product, but if the product advertised in the post doesn’t see an expected increase in sales, would you say that the apparent success of your social media campaign resulted in a commercial success?

It looks like the “like-free world” is here to stay, and it had already started making its way into social media through Instagram stories that don’t have any public metrics, but has exploded in popularity and usage with around 500 million users, brands and influencers using it everyday.

So to thrive in this digital age, it is crucial for every business to revamp its social media strategy by focusing more on quality content that resonates with your audience, and by looking at your action metrics with the engagement funnel approach. Removal of Likes convinces us that organic Instagram still has a place in marketing plans based on hidden analytics, arising from Instagram hiding its likes, and surfacing other action metrics — each having its own purpose for your brand.