About 6 months have passed since Instagram decided to experience the "disappearance of likes", that is, it chose to hide from users the possibility via mobile (not from PC) to view the number of "hearts" earned by other people's posts. An initiative that at least in part aims to push people to publish more content, avoiding the "discouragement" effect deriving from low public consensus (as is probably the case on Facebook, where private content has fallen since the golden age ).
But what would have been the consequences of this decision to date? Try to respond with a Buzzoole analysis in his Observatory on influencer marketing. Here are the results.
The number of average interactions is growing
The Observatory considered two time intervals, the first from 15 May to 15 July 2019 (before darkening) and the second from 25 September to 25 November 2019. The sample of analyzed posts is of Italian users who in the two periods used transparency hashtags (#ad, #sponsored, #fornitoda etc…).
In the first period, 20.7 million likes were recorded with 15 thousand contents, while in the second 56.4 million with 36 thousand posts. In order to compare the data of the two periods, it was decided to use the like index per post so as to have the average data per post. Contrary to expectations, the result was an increase in average interactions of 13.68%.
The differences by sector
The Observatory has focused attention on four sectors that greatly leverage influencer marketing: fashion, beauty, accessories and food. The first 200 posts with the most engagement for each category have been labeled, assigning each one a tag based on the sector of competence.
The two most active sectors, clothing and cosmetics, did not suffer any impact in terms of engagement from the test. In particular, on the posts of fashion influencers, an average of 3,600 likes per post were found, an increase of 6.33%. The increase in beauty creators was 3.2% lower with 1,400 more hearts than in the previous period.
Quite the opposite trend for the posts of the accessories and food sectors which see a slight decrease in average performance. The greatest drop in performance occurs from posts that sponsor accessories (-2.98% or -1700 likes per post), and food (-1.77% equal to 871 average interactions).
All that remains is to await further development and monitoring of the trend, which for the time being for marketing seems not to have had significantly negative consequences.