You´ve may heard the news that Instagram is taking away likes.
So in this episode we´re talking all about why would they do this,
what it means for you and most importantly,
how you can protect your business and your Instagram account
to make sure that you get even better results than you´ve ever did before.
Hey there my name is Adam Erhart, Marketing Strategist, and welcome to
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In today´s episode we´re doing things a little bit differently. I want to have a candid conversation
just me and you, discussing something that´s been on my mind
a lot lately and that´s essentially Instagram
taking away likes and it´s not just a fact that
they´re thinking about taking away likes and in many cases they´ve already started
to roll out this feature it´s got my mind kind of spinning
But rather what this means for marketing as a hole
and essentially the entire world of social media.
So, with all that said, let´s dive right into it, starting with:
Why would they do this? After all, Why would Instagram
take away one of the core features of the entire platform
with the likes and just wipe this right off the platform
completely. Well, Instagram is claiming that this has a lot to do
with mental health and essentially, removing some of
the pressure that people feel around creating content
And, it´s pretty reasonable actually. If you think about the amount of stress
and the amount of stories that you hear from different influencers
and even from friends and family and colleagues and
some of the stresses that goes into creating this content and then
the self judgement and all of the doubts
and insecurities that come to the surface when you put stuff out there
and it just doesn´t seem to resonate. I´ve heard tons and tons of stories
of people that go out there, spend all source of time creating this
content, post it and then they judge weather is successful
or not based on how many likes they get and if they don´t get that
arbitrary number that makes them feel good about the content
well, they just ripped off and completely deleted from the platform.
So, Instagram is saying that they´re trying to fight against this
they´re trying to remove some of the pressure by removing
all of those social signals and essentially, helping
people to stop trying get that outside validation for
their content, witch I guess they´re hopping is going to help them return to
more authentic and more valuable content
and really just focusing on the content it self rather than the reactions
they´re trying to get out of it. Is also no secret that social media
has come on some pretty heavy fire, I mean, the biggest example
being probably Facebook with their Cambridge Analytica scandal
and the data leaks and that whole nightmare. Well,
more and more people are taking a look at social media as influence
on our lives, on the lives of our kids, on the
lives of everybody that it impacts, witch is pretty much everybody.
And a lot of those effects... ahh... they ain´t so positive. Sure
there´s arguments against this saying that we´ve always had
social influence of some source, we´ve always had this publicly
displayed, sort of authority signals and that, but
they´re certainly a lot more prevalent today and social media
is now everywhere and we´re often able to
communicate with each other and get this signals lightning fast.
Anyway, regardless of Instagram motives for this,
Regardless of what they´re trying to claim they´re doing it for
or regardless of what people are perceiving them doing it for,
there´s one really clear and obvious reason that they are doing this:
Instagram is a business and removing likes
is a business decision. They can claim that
is to be altruistic and for mental health
and to try to protect its users, but all of this had been weight
heavily against the business impact that this decision is going to have.
What this means is that to us on the outside
of Instagram inner circle, well, we can judge
and we can guess and we can try to figure out why they´re
doing this but the reality is that
they´re doing this from a very strict and very
calculated business position. They really believe that
this is going to be best for the platform overall. Alright,
so what are some of the factors that have led to this? and
what´s kind of the clima that we´re currently in when it comes to social media and
when it comes to social proof and specifically the Instagram likes?
Well, it´s no surprise that trying to increase followers and
trying to get more likes it´s become a bit of an arms race
where essentially everybody has a new trick
and a new tactic, a new hack on how to build your audience
and increase your followers and get more likes on your content
and essentially, what this is led to is, again, a bit of
that arms race where people are just trying to stack up as much as this of
possible and is led to all source kind of sketchy and
questionable tactics as people try to gain the system
and really move things in their favor. What this means is
people are often less likely to post valuable content or
authentic content or content that is actually going to help somebody
if they fear
that´s not going to get the number of likes that they
deem that are needed to be successful in the platform.
So, people are basically self editing before they´ve even had a
chance to post that content and build that connection witch
at the end of the day is kinda what they´re going for. Basically, the platform is
kinda turned in a superficial magazine
review type site where people are producing
likable content or content that´s gonna get a lot of likes but
often lacks a ton of substance. Even worse that it
leads to even more questionable tactics like buying likes
or using bots or automation in order
to build your followers or essentially just kinda faking it
and making it look like you got more engagement than you actually do.
No surprise here, this is terrible for business. You see,
one of the misconceptions that arrives from doing Instagram
marketing or Facebook marketing or pretty much any kinda
marketing where people are able to comment and engage and like the
content you produce is that a lot of
people mistakenly believe that likes equals
revenue and likes do not equal revenue,
not in any way, shape or form. In fact, sometimes
the best perform in content is the stuff that maybe doesn´t get a ton of
likes but it actually ends up driving the most revenue for the business.
This is why when businesses are creating content with a sole goal of
trying to get more likes and trying to essentially produce all
those social signals, well it often ends up being a really bad business decision
that doesn´t lead to a lot of revenue growth overall.
This often happens when business try to build up
an audience for the sake of monetizing later or even worse,
building up an audience simply for the sake of building up an
audience. So, is Instagram removing likes
completely? When is this taking the fact? What
countries are being affected? What kind of accounts? Well, the reality
is that this program is already being rolled out
as your watching this right now. It´s already been tested in
a number of different markets and a number of different countries and
they´re trying to judge the impact and the effect of this
and really deciding if they´re going to rolled this out in the primary market witch
is the United States. It´s important to know that, well,
it does look like they´re moving in this direction, there´s no reason that
they won´t bring lights back later or introduce an
other kind of feature or whatever the case, right? They´re
always innovating and adapting and evolving and
trying to make the platform the best they can for their users. Because, again,
Instagram is a business and the better of it´s users are,
well, the more likely people are to advertise on the platform
witch is how it generate it´s revenue. Is also important to know that
other social media networks, namely Twitter,
have already started to play around with removing likes and
hiding social proof and seen how this affects
the overall users experience. The reality is that
nobody really knows. I mean, this could be a train that we see really
take off or could just get completely stateful and
never get rolled up on the main market and then they just wipe it out completely and
give everybody the likes back. The important thing here is to know
what this means, both the good and the bad so
you can use it to adapt your business accordingly. So, with all that said,
let´s get into the bad news first. As a business, there are a
couple downsides that come along with Instagram removing likes,
namely the fact that you´re not gonna be able to tell what kinda
content is working best for your competitors so is
gonna be hard to see whats working well and whats not. Again,
this is gonna be really superficial, because as we already talked about,
what gets likes isn´t necessarily the content
that generates the most revenue. An other negative is that
you´re not gonna be able to publicly displace social proof and social
proof is an incredibly important influential signal.
Really helps people make those decisions and decide that your
business is valuable. An other negative is that this
may actually make it easier for people to build up fake
followings and buy more followers, because in the
past what we where able to do is take a look of at an account and if they had
a tons of followers but really low engagement, well, it will signify that this followers where all fake
but if we´re not able to judge how many likes things get or what not
It´s gonna make it a little harder to discern weather an account actually has
that kinda credibility or not. Alright, so now the good news.
And the first piece of good news is that you as a
business or as an influencer as a content creator
well you´re still gonna be able to see all of your own likes
witch means, when you create content you´re gonna be able to see
what kinda content resonates best with your market and what falls flat.
Honestly, that´s the best piece of news that I´ve got for you here. The fact that
you´re still gonna get access to that analytical data
so you can make the right decisions moving forward. But,
a really important caveat, a really important warning is that
user behavior is going to change
if this featured gets rolled out unanimously.
So, if you see either a dipping likes or a
suden increase of likes, well, it´s going to be important to sort of re-calibrate
your base line or whatever
you´re using to judge weather the post is effective or not. Because again,
that behavior is going to change once this things are no longer visible.
Alright, so as a business or as an influencer
as a creator, what should you do with this information, how do you make it
best surview so you don´t get left behind here.
Well, my first piece of advice is something that pretty much sets regardless
weather they have likes or weather they don´t show likes and that´s
to really focus on creating high quality content. I know I´ve said this
times and times again. But the reality is weather likes are visible
or not, high quality content is still gonna perform better
than low quality content. No surprise there right? Plus, as I already mention
you´re still going to get to see witch parts of your content
did well and witch parts didn´t do well.
So, you´re still going to be able to focus in and really narrowing on the aspect
and the creator and the copy of what kind of post do well and
what don´t do so well. The next tip I have is to
really focus on providing value. You got a really unique opportunity here.
People aren´t gonna see how many likes things get
so you´re going to have an opportunity to create post that provide
more value or maybe a little sort of less "likable"
and less social worthy but are going to be more authentic
and essentially really connect with your target market
in a way that you´ve might have been a little sketchy too before.
An other opportunity here is to focus on Instagram Story's.
Focus on having more conversations in the comments.
Focus on building those conversations and those connections in the dm´s.
Again, just because that social proof aspect
is going away, doesn´t mean that the relationships and
creating valuable content and
all those other concepts don´t still apply. Lastly, it should come with no surprise
that they are making this changes or this edits and
we may have not expected them to remove likes but it doesn´t mean that
a change wasn´t coming at some point. So what this does
is it really does opens up some of the opportunity here
for you to transition, maybe some of your time and money and energy
away from your organic strategy and more towards
an Instagram ads strategy. Instagram advertising is still
an incredibly underutilized and really cost effective
strategy for most businesses out there. So if you
haven´t already, now is a good time to start trying that strategy out.
With that said, I´m gonna make sure to link up a video
right here on Instagram advertising, how get you
started and get you off the right foot, because I really believe this is
probably going to be the next best logically transition
for you and your business if your not already running Instagram Ads.
And if you are, well the video is gonna provide more advice
and ideas and strategies to help you get better results
from your campaigns. Alright, so thanks so much for watching
and we catch up next time, on The Marketing Show