According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 86% of marketers intend to dedicate a portion of their budget to influencer marketing this year.
On the 17th of July, the industry was caught by surprise with the announcement that Instagram will start hiding the Likes public counter in an international test to remove pressure on users seeking Likes. The stated goal is to support better mental health amongst users.
Influencers and agencies see this as a threat to future growth but Connector, an Irish Open Innovation Studio, believes that it is only a start for better measurement. Twitter and Instagram have a very funny verification process and non transparent and will not tell us how but you have genuine people that are known household names and then you have unknowns verified and many knowns NOT verified, However if like me and many others the term itself is bandied around too much and people are labelled as influencers and the metrics do not add up and perhaps this is a good thing to clamp down on the term and the SELF APPOINTED
“Likes were always a false metric, from people buying fake engagements to research showing no correlation between Likes and sales. We believe this is a positive development to lead marketers to look beyond vanity metrics and measure influencers strategically” says Ivan Adriel, Head of Digital at Connector.
In their latest infographic, Connector explores the best practices to find and measure influencer efforts looking beyond the Likes.
