Instagram (or Insta as the platform is called by the cognoscienti) is experimenting with a feature that removes likes. It’s a move that potentially should remove the social pressure users experience: nothing is more devastating on a social media platform than nobody linking your posts.
This has of course a huge impact on all those influencers on the platform. Basically, likes are the currency of influencers: more likes (=engagement) equals more money. If you remove the likes from the equation – well it doesn’t work anymore. If you are a company that invests in influencers (and pay them accordingly), you probably should get starting to look for alternatives. Or quit social media altogether, like Lush did in the past and focus on real interactions.
If you still need to digitally interact with your customers, you best option is building your own network of users without using a large platform as mediator that you have no control over. Our customers did this in the past by building a content hub and adding several apps around it to create a network of customers. This strategy let’s you control your content and have your own engagement measurements, without relying on a platform.
