Transcript:

Hey guys so originally I intended a different topic for this week’s marketing minute. But then this popped up, and I thought it a bit more timely and I realized I hadn’t really addressed it here with you yet so we’re talking about the removal of the likes from your social platforms.

Now a lot of you already know the back in June Instagram started testing the removal of likes in certain countries. And now, within the last week, we started to see it roll out here in the US, and there’s been a lot of speculation that Facebook and other platforms might follow suit.

So first I wanted to clarify that this is on the consumer and audience side. So brands and marketers and page admins will still be able to see their likes in their insights on the back end. But the audience won’t on the front.

Now there’s a number of reasons they’re doing this and a lot of them have to do with the mental health aspects along also with people trying to essentially game the system. And if you follow me for any amount of time. You know that I’ve already talked about brands and marketers focusing on things other than vanity metrics.

And I actually see this move as a great thing. I think it’ll require people to focus on the quality of their content, as opposed to that more click-baity, like-driving type of stuff. And just in general I think we’ll see more creativity and quality.

And then on the brand and marketer standpoint side, I think we’re gonna see more accurate insights. It’ll weed out some of that tribal liking (I liked it because my friends did) kind of stuff. Those things are probably already effecting our numbers. And skewing them. So I think we’ll end up getting more accurate numbers on our content.

So, to wrap it up, I want to know A. If you’ve seen this roll out on your Instagram feed yet? and B. what are your thoughts? What questions or concerns does it raise for you. Let me know in the comments, and I think my next blog post I’ll follow up with this so we can go into a little more detail about why and what maybe we can do to address it, and hopefully I can address some of your questions there too.

And that’s the marketing minute.