In an age of virtual marketing, not having a social media account for your business can be a considerable drawback. With over a billion active users and a fast-increasing user database, Instagram is the place to be if you want to establish a credible social media presence for your business. This, however, is easier said than done. The site is already teeming with scores of competitors vying for the attention of the same target audience as you. It takes a lot of time, effort, and even money to market yourself well. Rarely has the platform had professional accounts facing little or no competition? When it comes to building a strong IG presence, it is not just about getting the right audience pool to notice you. Instead, it is more about understanding how Instagram focuses on specific profiles over others.
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
Whether you are a small business or an industry giant, getting your business account noticed on the platform can be a nerve-wracking challenge if you do not consider the working of the dynamic algorithms that manage account visibility here. After all, the site itself has seen too many changes in its short lifetime.
What Began as a Photo-sharing App, Now Is a Booming Social Networking Space for All Kinds of Visual Content
The site has constantly been upgrading the algorithms that determine the visibility and reach for accounts. Several parameters are taken into account to make the IG experience as personalized as possible for each user. So, Instagrammers are constantly left wondering how best to tailor their marketing strategy for this platform. Should they be concentrating on building follower count? Should more budget be allocated to running ads? What about likes, saves, and comments? Where do these forms of engagement stand?
Now, buying social signals is one popular method employed to speed up starting on the platform. Likes have been a preferred signal in such purchases. Likes are also bought to bring momentum to accounts facing a lull in their engagement rates. Many professionals have long invested in periodically paid likes from the FollowersId portal and other trusted sellers. Those willing to be more patient with their social media growth consider organic methods of improving likes and saves on their content.
But recently, following a period of selective testing, Instagram made it possible for users to hide likes. The option is used by many to leave viewers unable to determine how many likes a post has gathered. While the option brings in a novel experience of using IG, it also begs the question: do hidden likes still count as an essential factor in Instagram metrics?
What Is the Difference Between Hidden Likes and Regular Instagram Likes?
In terms of backend functioning-none. In terms of front-end usage, it brings IG users a whole new experience. For the longest time, likes were Instagram’s most decisive visual and psychological parameter of a post’s success.
• The rat race for getting more likes than others made people lose focus on their posts’ quality and information content and concentrate more on audience reception metrics. This competitiveness increased further when Covid struck the globe as a pandemic and made people remain holed up in their homes for long periods.
• The time spent on social media exponentially increased, and social media-related socio-psychological problems like inferiority complex, depression, and other mental health issues. It led Instagram to experiment with hiding likes.
• The aim was to lessen the competitiveness and mental pressure of always putting one’s best foot forward. In other words, it was a move made to improve the quality of time spent on Instagram.
While there was no conclusive evidence that the experiment reduced people’s anxiety, loneliness, or ego worries, many users liked the experience. Despite an equal number of IG users finding the same experience unsettling, Instagram decided to retain this feature of hiding likes in its new updates. Every IG user, regardless of whether they have a business account or a personal one, can now opt to hide the like counter on their profile as a whole or selective post.