LOS ANGELES—“With great powers come great responsibility." Spiderman’s uncle famous quote should definitely mean something for powerful mass leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg, owner of several companies including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The popularity of social media platforms and their use by younger people have been feeding a lot of sociology and psychology fears about self-esteem and egocentrism. The original purpose of social media is to connect people through personal posts and share ideas but it quickly escalated to a race for likes and attention.
This is why Instagram has decided to launch a test in Canada—their favorite testing playground—to hide the likes and views counts on their users' posts. If the results are positive, they will apply this new model to all their members very soon.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri explained that the idea was to create a “less pressurized environment where people feel comfortable expressing themselves." He explained that they have noted how people are worried about the number of likes they get and that they would rather prefer their users to focus on the content they share.
At 7 Veils, we spend a lot of time on several social media platforms and we clearly see that many users—marketers or not—sadly tend to overshare in a desperate challenge for likes and leads instead of working on their content and a real strategy.
It also opens a huge door for robots and scammers who will try to force the influencer level and benefit from the situation.
This measure Instagram is taking might scare some users, but it should actually contribute to a quality filter that strong brands could appreciate.
We often see this common mistake about social media vanity numbers pushing companies and independent workers to value quantity over quality. Depending on our clients’ strategies, targeted leads are often the best return on their time and money investment.
Social media marketing has obviously become a very powerful tool since it took such a great part in many daily lives and habits. At the crossroad between entertainment, information and consumption, it has become one of the core communication channels worldwide. Because of this great social impact, psychologists and social observers have seen a huge amplification of personal distress, mental weaknesses due to self-esteem faintness, cyberbullying and eventually in some sad cases a direct link with suicides. This is why companies such as Instagram have the moral duty to improve their cyber environment.
Since the counts will still be accessible from the account owner panel, influencer marketers should still be able to provide the metrics the companies need to evaluate their outreach power. The sales and engagement impact of their posts though, could be affected in a negative way since the followers won’t have any idea about how popular the post is.
From a marketing perspective, it will make it more difficult to see what other people are doing successfully. Looking at performance of competitor or influencer posts have always been a way to help craft your own strategy, or gauge your own brand performance. It will also make it more difficult for influencers to show their efficacy potential. Part of what influencer marketing is based upon is the engagement rate, which is your engagement divided by your follower count. Though users will be able to see their own engagement rate, brands looking to find an engager won’t be able to look, which could make it more difficult to organically find engagers or make people more reliant upon follower count.
We might slowly get back to an experience where the user might have to think again for himself and if so, the secret of a good marketing strategy will be the consistency of the messages or this may cause a shift where follower count becomes the only metric that people value.
If you need any assistance or information from 7 Veils Social Media Marketing agency, please email [email protected].
