No more ‘LIKES’ on Instagram. How will influencers and brands collaborate now?

Be it a rumour or be it an official statement coming from Mark Zuckerberg, but the latest buzz doing the rounds in the digital world is that Instagram will soon take off its ‘Like’ button. If this turns out to be true in due time, there will be a major impact on a lot of businesses out there. One of the biggest impacts will be felt by the Influencer Marketing industry!

How do you classify someone as an ‘influencer’? Simply speaking, any individual who can influence someone when it comes to making choices. They are categorized as Mega, Macro, Micro, Advocates, Referrers, and Loyalists. With the emergence of the phenomenon of Influencer Marketing, brands across all segments and categories have leveraged on the popularity of these individuals. Contrary to public opinion that Instagram removing the ‘like’ button will cause more bad than good, influencers in fact believe it’s a welcome move. This decision will cut down and freeze a lot of influencer profiles out there. Statistics have proven that India ranks among the top 3 countries in the world with most number of fake Instagram accounts!

If you see the sunny side of things, Instagram doing away with the ‘like’ button will mean other engagement-driven platforms to classify someone as an influencer. This means there will be an addition of more parameters to gauge someone’s popularity like comments, shares, saves etc. One very important pointer that needs to be noted here is that the ‘like’ button is going to be hidden for users, and not for the actual account holder. One of the biggest pros is that this major move is going to make everyone be less worried about the ’likes’ factor and thus encourage people to put more content. This paradigm shift is expected to completely change the Influencer Marketing ecosystem. Let’s wait and watch.

Pic Credit: Casal Cristao