How to navigate a like-free space
If Instagram's hidden-like design test were to come to fruition, it would undoubtedly change the game for marketers and social content creators alike. But, what about businesses?
If you own a business that not only has an online presence, but relies on it to raise awareness of your brand and generate results, you may also need to change the way you work to continue to grow and engage with your audience in a like-free space.
What should you post?
Without seeing visible signs of social media engagement, it will be more difficult for you to tell what type of content is performing well with your target audience and, therefore, what you should continue posting more of.
Instead, you will need to look closely at other metrics, such as the number of comments or people tagging their friends or asking questions on your posts, to identify what's getting people’s engines going.
You may also need to spend more time getting under the skin of your target audience to develop a content marketing strategy that truly aligns with their own goals.
Who should you work with?
Like it or not, influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways for you to directly engage with your target audience on social media. Finding and vetting influencers to work with, however, will become harder to do in a like-free world.
Again, you will need to look at other metrics of engagement along with page likes or number of followers to determine whether a particular influencer will deliver a good ROI or not. Not forgetting, sentiment, values, previous brands they've worked with and the quality of their content.
If you're looking to enter into the realm of co-branding, you might look into another company’s posts to see how many reactions, views etc. they've received. If their posts have solid visible engagement, it could signify that said company is worth partnering with.
Perhaps you’re a small business looking to partner with a big-time player. Why not ask your customers to 'Like' you online, or review you on your company page? This will amp up your like counts and ratings and, subsequently, show co-marketing prospects that you have heaps to offer.
How can you compete?
Even if you lose likes, you can still look at the profiles of your competitors to learn about their overall content strategy. If they're sharing certain types of content regularly, this could be because they're gaining good metrics from this strategy.
On Facebook, you can easily see how similar pages are doing by adding pages that you'd like to monitor to a social listening list of sorts via the Insights tab.
If you need help navigating a like-free world, get in touch to learn about how I can lead you to success.