How to Track Influencer Campaign Success After the Removal of Instagram Likes

From all of the memes, endless articles, and your own Instagram usage, you would have noticed that Instagram has started their trial to hide the number of likes on posts. Whilst this trial has only rolled out in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Brazil, Italy and Ireland, and can possibly be reverted at any time, today we wanted to talk about what this means for businesses with a large emphasis on influencer marketing, and what the next steps might be.  

Why Instagram Is Trialling The Removal of Likes

Although you can still view the likes you receive on your own posts, other user’s likes will no longer be visible. The trial has been implemented to “remove pressure” on users.

“We hope this test will remove the pressure of how many likes a post will receive, so you can focus on sharing the things you love”, said Mia Garlic, director of policy for Facebook Australia and New Zealand.

While this may be a great thing for personal users, this changes a lot of things for business, especially when it comes to influencer marketing.

The removal of likes can now make it harder for businesses to search and scout influencers to collaborate with for their brand’s influencer marketing strategies.

While previously scrolling through an Instagram influencers profile and viewing the amount of likes and views they receive was a helpful way of measuring their average engagement rate, we are no longer able to do this.

This also makes it harder to measure the results and success of an influencer collaboration a business has implemented.

Why Does Not Seeing Likes On Instagram Matter

While this may seem like a scary change for businesses and agencies, rest assured, this isn’t the only way to measure a successful influencer campaign.

This change can actually have the potential to work in favour of agencies and businesses. Why? Because it means influencers will need to start being more open and transparent about their results in order to secure collaborations.

As we can no longer view easy engagement indicators such as the amount of likes on a post, it means that there will be a heavier demand for influencers to create and use ‘media kits’. 

An influencer media kit generally includes a summary of their social stats (Instagram followers, Youtube subscribers, blog views per month, etc), their monthly traffic (reach, impressions, engagement rate, average likes and comments per post etc), as well as their defined Instagram audience (the percentage of male vs female as well as what countries their audience are from).

Agencies and businesses will now need to be requesting media kits to gain an insight into whether an influencer is suitable for their campaign.

How To Track Influencer Success

Where we can really measure the success of a campaign is through requesting screenshots of their in-app Instagram insights after they have posted.

Like the screenshot below, you can see the amount of likes, comments, shares and saves the post has received. In addition to this, you can also see how many accounts the post reached, as well as impressions, profile visits and website clicks. For Instagram Stories you can see the amount of people that have viewed the story as well as the amount of sticker taps your brand’s Instagram username has received.

Another way to track the success of an influencer campaign is by creating Swipe-Up tracking links for an influencers Instagram Stories, which means you can see the amount of people that have swiped up and navigated to the provided link (such as your company’s homepage, online store or a product stockist).

These metrics will be able to tell you whether or not the influencer’s audience were engaged or took any actions relating to your brand.

Other Influencer Marketing Tips

The most important takeaway from this is that COMMUNICATION IS KEY.

When negotiating and discussing your influencer collaboration, it is vital to make sure that you outline clear deliverables and any requests to access insights. It’s important that you and the influencer you are working with are on the same page and both agree to the same terms.