News has come out that Instagram will hide "like counts" from everyone but yourself. What does this mean for the social media world?
UPDATE: INSTAGRAM HAS STILL NOT IMPLEMENTED THIS IN THE US; WILL THEY?
Personally, I am happy for social media users in general because I know like count insecurity was affecting many people’s mental health, however, the owners themselves can still see the numbers, so I wonder how much of a difference it will even make.
From a marketing perspective I feel that this is annoying because as far as we know, sponsors will not be able to see (truthfully) how many likes an influencer gained on a post and customer credibility could go down because of the invisibility there as well. For example, one way I used to gauge good interactivity was by seeing if posts on average had about 10 likes per hundred followers, but now I will have to look elsewhere. I also wonder how this would affect Facebook/Instagram's paid ad sales and marketing because many people were using it to get higher like counts.
The good part will be that comments and followers will become more important than ever. This may force instagrammers to make more engaging content to increase commenting because when they are "illegally" purchased, they're easy for people to recognize and call out for fraud.
Instagram has not officially stated when or if this will permanently roll out large scale, but it should be interesting to see how it affects instagrammers!
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