Facebook Likes Now Redundant

Instagram went on a “likes” ban wave not too long ago. Facebook will now be doing the same, and Australia seems to be the first and only one affected. While Instagram had a bit of backlash at the start, the removed feature did not seem to have impacted the user experience for the worst, and people have already gotten accustomed to it.

While Instagram relied heavily on “influencer” marketing, which involved measuring statistics of likes + comments, Facebook is a little different. The whole basis of Facebook’s symbol and brand revolves around the iconic “thumbs up” - which could be a little contradictory if they’re removing this feature.

Just to be clear, we’re still able to like on Facebook (posts, content, ads, etc). We’re just not given how many people have actually liked a piece of content. Exactly the same as Instagram. With the same intention in mind as IG, Facebook wants to enhance the user experience and remove the social “pressure” of social credibility and popularity gauge.

"We want Facebook to be a place where people can connect and share in ways most valuable to them. To that end, in Australia we are testing making the total number of likes, reactions and video view counts across Facebook private. We want to understand from people whether removing the total counts improves their experience, while also not limiting any positive interactions," said Facebook Australia's Director of Policy, Mia Garlick.

However, we’re still able to see our own metrics internally. We are still able to make judgements and analytics based on the likes on our content. This means only you can see how many likes your post have gotten for decision making purposes. The likes are only hidden to the public eye.

When will it happen?

As of Friday 27th September, Facebook has started to roll out the removed feature to Australian accounts. Not everyone will be affected, as they are likely to add the update batch by batch. This means you might see the change on yours new feed in the next few days, whether personal or business account. It is unknown at the moment how long they are going to test this for, as the Instagram wave is currently still ongoing.

How will it affect business pages and advertising?

Moving forward it will be interesting to see how this change affects how businesses use Facebook. For people who are familiar with advertising, one campaign objective we have is the post engagement objective. This campaign objective is used to build social proof across your content and ads. With the removal of likes, businesses might have to resort to comments and shares only for social credibility. Strategies might change depending on the industry you’re in - as some rely heavily on likes, some not so much. But with all this being said, Facebook is only doing this as a test for the moment, we don’t know how long or when they’re going to implement permanent change, or revert back to normal. Because the social world is evolving rapidly - the best we can do is adapt to change and adjust strategies accordingly when these things happen. If you’d like to have a chat about changes and strategies, we’re open to coffee.

You can shoot us a message here: https://socialrev.com.au/contact

Until then, happy advertising!

SocialRev Team

‍