As yet another social media platform trials another experiment, you can pretty much guarantee marketers are calling emergency meets to find the loop hole. With Instagram hiding likes, and moving to a more quality model, surely this is a good thing for any business who has good solid content?
Likes have become a great big popularity contest in the cloud, rather than a mark of a good business or expertise. And where people trust quantity over quality it has led to a market place full of fakes and frauds.
An environment where we hire click farms and/or Influencers to effectively buy followers which can build brands overnight. What appears to be the real deal due to 100k+ followers or thousands of post likes are often just set-up back drops and fake lifestyles. Ummm hello have we learnt anything from what happened with Fayre Festival?!
For Start-ups wanting to really connect and engage with people around their products and services, a shift in the ‘Like’ landscape will hopefully clear away some of the BS that is taking up so much space in our timelines, and allow for genuine businesses to be seen.
As ‘Likes’ have evolved they have created a false state in our digital landscapes, across the platforms and with it an arena of comparison, anxiety and judgement between individuals and amongst us collectively.
“I am super aware of how ‘likes’ influence how I both I create and consume,” shared @anna_sansom_writer on an IG post when I asked my network how they feel about this potential change coming to Instagram.
Jack Doresy has admitted on TED just recently ‘How Twitter needs to change’, saying, “If I had to start the service again, I would not emphasise the ‘like’ count as much, I don’t think I would even create ‘like’ in the first place.”
I hope this marks a shift in how we use these technologies and incredible platforms to connect with others around authentic businesses, their content and causes. That we really start to see social media as a source for building good relationships through engagement, over a superficial like. As another commenter Leena, on my post shares, “I’m going beyond tapping that ❤️ button and actually commenting”. We can lurk behind likes, thinking we are entering a conversation when really we are not. I hold my hands up for being part of that behaviour.
My mission with Social Media For A New Age is to help people create and consume social media without getting influenced by likes, so I am anticipating this change and what it shall bring with much interest and intrigue.
Social Media for a New Age,
Is the next stage,
in how we engage.
When we raise the vibration,
And have some fun,
much more than likes and follows, are ours to be won.
Ultimately, I am all for social platforms trialing new things, because if they didn’t we would be forever stuck in a rut churning out the same old stuff and not getting anywhere. It means we have to think more about what we are communicating (and not fall into the cookie cutter trap), if our content is personal, unique and subjective there really is nothing to fear.