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."
"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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
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