Hiding Likes: The Instagram Shift Shining A Light on Engagement Metrics

Today we’ve released the latest in our Social Questions series of short videos where industry leaders talk about which metric they focus on to measure performance.

The information is timely, considering Instagram’s recent announcement that it will begin to test the “hiding of likes” in the United States. Take the time to watch it on our Resources/Video page and consider the opportunity a future without ‘likes’ provides.

Our clients can be assured this is a visual change only for users. It doesn’t affect APIs, Ad Manager or Page Insights at this time. As an official Media Measurement Partner of Facebook, we only use these officially supported integrations to collect data, to ensure the data we provide to our users is of the highest first-party standard and free from privacy or TOS considerations.

But from a user point of view important questions remain. When Instagram first announced this potential change earlier this year, it opened up an important discussion about competitive analysis. How much do ‘likes’ really matter in the context of content or campaign performance?

If the industry ultimately adopts the change and begins to slowly move away from this volume-based marker, it will signal a shift toward more meaningful insights about why your audience is responding and what else moves them. What ensues is a deeper discussion of how success is measured, and a more thorough understanding of that audience that’s more likely to move the strategic needle instead of simply stating a larger like count.

One thing is for certain, the social landscape will continue to evolve along with an audience that will also change the way it interacts with and consumes content.

Here are Shareablee’s recommendations on the top 3 approaches to use for mining ROI from your Instagram content or campaign:

Audience Engagement Insights

• With our Affinity tool, understand your audience behaviors across platforms to know which brands, media and product categories your audience (and your competitors’ audience) care most about for strategic intelligence
• Gain visibility into your true unique audience across multiple social pages and platforms, and benchmark against your competition, rather than simply counting “likes” and “followers”
• Uncover the real strengths of your active social audience, from the advertiser’s perspective, so you can ensure successful partner pitches

Actionable Best Practices

• With our Partnerships explorer tool, gather insights into branded content strategies to understand best practices for pitching, benchmarking performance, and driving ROI with campaigns
• Identify the right media and sponsorship partners for your customers and prospects based on the true preferences of consumers you are actively communicating and engaging with
• Measure the impact and effectiveness of each branded content campaign in real-time, from core social KPIs to shifts in behavior, attitudes and consumer sentiment

Competitive Benchmarking

• Showcase your key metrics and engaging quality of your branded videos, relative to industry benchmarks
• Uncover competitive threats based on real behaviors as you discover who your customers and prospects are also spending their time with, among your industry set and new industry entrants and disruptors
• Understand how the competition is allocating their budget and spend across industry verticals to identify new opportunities
• Utilizing Power Rankings, draw from standardized social media performance measurement at the parent company level, creating the first holistic view that enables marketers, agencies, and researchers to evaluate social media audiences like web and TV audiences

What now?

Our Customer Success team is here to help you leverage the Shareablee product suite to ensure you are drawing on those tools that are truer measures of performance and help you deliver on your campaign goals.

Contact us to set up a call or if you’re new to Shareablee message us for a demo.