You hear the stories constantly of online bullying amongst the teens, with it sometimes creeping in to adult interaction. So this new user option is a design by the tech giants to help curb issues that may lead to mental health and possible social-media addiction.
Although it is only being tested at this stage in certain countries (New Zealand, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Australia and Ireland), what could the long term ramifications be for so-called ‘Insta-bloggers’ and self-made ‘influencers’ who always use the lines, “make sure you subscribe and like…” when introducing or exiting their content pieces? It is being engrained in to society that we must ‘like’ posts that we watch.
A lot of these self-made influencers rose to prominent exposure due to views and likes as their clips went viral. Now although views are not part of the testing, it can be argued that it goes hand-in-hand with the likes, no? Most users are more likely to re-post or even view content by firstly looking at how many likes it has, or possibly the views. How then will we get the next great Insta sensation if we don’t see how many ‘likes’ their post gets? Some sceptics reckon this is a subtle way of curbing the mass production of trash content so that only those with real ability and talent will get seen. Somehow I don’t believe Instagram care or are that calculated.
Although we understand that this new proposed feature will not affect brands and is more designed for the everyday consumer, what if Instagram decided to roll this out across the whole platform, how do you think your brand will cope without the world seeing how many likes your post received? Yes you have the metrics on the backend for your marketing analysis and what not, but to the average consumer, as mentioned, they may only be looking at engaging because they have seen or heard how many likes your content piece received, which can sometimes be a talking point in itself when being discussed and reviewed on media outlets.
So far, early indication suggests it is having a positive effect on test users in Canada. It will be interesting to see if they roll it out to the UK for testing, and if it gets the full green light across the platform as a whole. For now though, the brands and influencers that we like, we can still see that we do.
