Key takeaways:
- Instagram’s experiment with removing likes has left companies scrambling for new strategies beyond measuring how many times a heart icon is tapped.
- Brands are increasingly looking at performance data from Instagram Stories, which now counts over half a billion daily active users.
- The experiment represents an opportunity for brands to invest in micro-influencers and new talent that awards them cultural cachet.
NEW YORK — This summer, Instagram began experimenting with putting the like counter behind the curtain, hiding them from followers but keeping them visible to account owners. Instagram started concealing likes in markets such as Canada, Australia, Brazil and Japan from May; it said at that time that the intention was to create a “less pressurised environment”. (Users have the ability to opt out.)
By eliminating a key measurement in the infinite online popularity contest, Instagram has led influencer marketers to rethink their strategy. The Facebook-owned company dominates the global $8 billion influencer marketing ecosystem — 79 per cent of brands leverage the photo-sharing app for influencer campaigns, more than any other major Western social media platform. Influencer spending is expected to increase to $15 billion by 2022, according to Business Insider Intelligence.
Brands have been conditioned to look at follower counts, average likes and engagement rate percentages (divide average likes per post by follower count and multiply by 100). A 2 to 3 per cent engagement rate on influencer posts is sufficient for most brands, with 4 to 6 per cent considered excellent, says Lexie Carbone, marketing campaign lead at Later Media. That will have to change.
Likes are increasingly seen as a “vanity metric”, and savvy marketers have already begun asking influencers for more meaningful data, says Carbone. That includes follower demographic data such as location, age and gender, as well as weekly impressions and the number of accounts reached.
Brands are also focusing more on Instagram Stories, which as of January, had over 500 million daily active users. Performance metrics in Stories have always been private, but it’s become an important format for influencer partnerships, with brands now asking for indications like swipe-ups, sticker taps and story completion rates to judge how content is doing.
This is only going to accelerate, says Amrit Sidhu, a creative consultant who has been hired as an influencer and DJ for brands like Nike and Coach. “Now, brands look at engagement and make a judgement on their own, whereas without public likes, they’re going to ask for talents’ stats.”
There is a risk that without likes, less sophisticated brands will simply default to the visible follower count as their guiding metric, says Sean Spielberg, chief executive and co-founder of the influencer analytics tool Instascreener. “In addition to fake followers, many services sell fake likes and comments too, so a high number of likes is no longer a guarantee that an influencer's content is being seen by real people.”
Brands need to consider not only how many people they reach, but also who they reach. "Someone with a significantly lower following could be followed by all the right people — creatives, editors, other highly influential people — and working with them would be more impactful to a blogger with millions of followers," says Sidhu. A clothing brand seeking trade press coverage will do better employing micro-influencers with a fashion editor following than an influencer with a large but more consumer-oriented audience, many influencer marketers say.
Additionally, labels should seek to understand if an influencer's personal brand fits with what they are trying to achieve. Instagram earlier this year unveiled a feature that allows clients to boost the posts of their paid influencers, but the best partners are organic. Sidhu, for instance, has worked with a hijabi influencer who is regularly approached by bikini brands for paid partnerships, a product she would not promote. “It’s [as if] they don’t even look at her profile, just her numbers,” she says.
Year Of Ours, a women's fitness brand, prioritises qualitative attributes when hiring influencer talent for lookbook photo shoots and hosting events or workouts. “Our girl is active and has her own style and voice, and it is important that those characteristics shine through in her own content,” says co-founder Eleanor Haycock.
She cites Ana Saber, who has modelled and hosted dinner and fitness events, and vegan advocate Mishka as examples of talent with “great style, engaging stories and [who use] their voice in the industry to change something”. Both have under 100,000 followers.
The removal of likes is also an opportunity for labels to focus on new talent. It will require extra work but also allows brands to establish themselves as cutting-edge. Sidhu hired photographer Tyler Mitchell for an American Eagle campaign after discovering his photography on Instagram. He had 10,000 followers at the time, but he was a good fit for American Eagle Autumn 2016 campaign that highlighted the influence of young American millennials, says Sidhu. His profile skyrocketed over the next two years, and he became the first black photographer to shoot a cover for American Vogue in September 2018.
Similarly, Haycock prefers hiring untapped modelling talent directly on Instagram, because models with non-traditional looks are less likely to be on agency rosters.
Whether Instagram opts to remove public likes or keep the platform’s profile as is, leveraging an influencer solely on their likes and subsequent engagement rate doesn’t equate a strategy. Smart brands and influencers will need to think beyond broadcasting content to the largest possible audience, says Sidhu. “Likes or no likes, if Instagram went down, I still have a job.”
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