Advertisers and influencers alike are paying more attention to how many people click on e-commerce links, rather than "vanity metrics" like the number of likes.
Instagram recently rolled out a feature that enables influencers and brands to directly link to products pictured in posts. These sort of links to e-commerce sites are more valuable than the number of likes a sponsored post gets, according to Amar Braithwaite, a social media marketing strategist with Tinuiti.
"We're starting to see the shift for click-through commerce. We can now gauge whether or not an influencer is really making a sale and whether they're contributing to the bottom dollar," Braithwaite said. "Brands are going to move away from the vanity metrics of likes and follower counts."
Focusing on click-throughs instead of likes will also weed out influencers who buy fake likes, a practice that experts say is common.
"Hiding likes will be a major inflection point in the influencer industry. The influencers that were propped up on illegitimate audiences will fade away, leaving the true creators to shine," said Matt Zuvella, vice president of marketing at FamePick.
The number of fake likes being bought by influencers was becoming such a problem in recent years that it was discouraging some advertisers from seeking partnerships on Instagram.
"We saw that bot fraud was a major issue over the last couple years. Not even because people wanted to necessarily fool brands, but they wanted their followers to think a post of them or what they were working on was perceived as successful," Detert said. "This removes that need and will be a big blow to the 'duping farms' economy of buying fake likes."
Hiding like counts could also reduce the pressure influencers feel and encourage more users to post in the feed, rather than in Instagram stories — temporary posts that are thereby less lucrative for monetization.
"We've seen the shift to stories and everybody's doing their stuff in stories and it lasts less long. Unfortunately, that means there's going to be less feed-based posts which means there's less ad revenues," Braithwaite said. "With hiding likes, people are going to post more pictures because they aren't worried about how they'll perform."
Influencers are likely to keep exploring other options, but so far no other app has built a monetizable platform that's comparable to Instagram.
"Ultimately influencers care about two things: growing their audiences and making money. It's still too early to tell if there are any changes in engagement metrics," Captiv8 CEO Krishna Subramanian said. "Instagram and YouTube are the two best ecosystems for influencers to monetize their audiences and we don't expect that to change in the short term."
"I think by nature influencers come to the table with a very entrepreneurial, savvy mentality so they've been testing new platforms since the inception," Braithwaite said. "I don't think the [decision to hide likes] will change that but it might open their eyes."
