If it's my cousin with a fish, of course I'll like the photo. That's me saying, "I saw that fish, good work, keep it up," and my cousin takes my like the same way.
If it's a big account, what's the point of being like #14532143, or even upvoting top page reddit/hn posts for that matter? Is it just cathartic or something? I don't get the point.
Disclaimer: I possibly don't know what I am talking about as I don't really know Instagram mechanics at all, but I am guessing they are similar to Facebook's.
Also if you view the activity feed (in a different corner of the app) you can see what your friends have been up to. This is where you will see more explicitly "Sally, Sue, John and Dave liked a post by Mr. Famous" (and similar activity).
Wrong.
In your notifications screen (who liked your stuff), you can change pane and instead see what your friends has liked.
Most people don’t know it, but yes, it means you can “spy” on your spouse or vica-verce.
It’s the sort of creepy most people wanted to avoid when they left Facebook, and unknown to them, Instagram still has it.
My comment was merely meant as a correction to an incorrect claim and making people aware that they can be spied upon, also on Instagram.
This doesn’t apply to “sponsored” posts, which show up in my feed regardless of what I like (and are almost always about plane tickets or cell phone plans). They are so uncharacteristic as to be easy to spot, and if they were engaging, the brand wouldn’t have paid to distribute them.
It's just one example, but I tried to measure this once by graphing clicks on tweets by Tim O'Reilly. He's got a nice history since he was early on Twitter and mostly uses Bit.ly so click data is publicly available.
What I found was that in 2010 he had about 500k followers and was getting 800 clicks per link on average. But by 2018, he was only getting 400 clicks despite his follower count having grown to 2M.
So, from Tim's perspective, the value of a follower dropped by a factor of 8. I think that's interesting even if we don't know exactly why the drop because it highlights the vanity of follower counts. Rather than feeling like his audience grew on Twitter, he should feel like it shrunk in half.
It's hard to draw definitive conclusions on why the drop. Was it diffusion? People who worked at Twitter tell me it was a cultural change too where people stopped using Twitter as a feed reader. So maybe that's part of it too.
Measurement is hard and conclusions even harder.
I've definitely done it myself. I follow because I'm really interested, so I interact with the posts on the new thing, and gradually I get less interested as the content becomes less novel. Just as an example, I got really interested in the CNCF and followed them, but after a time, my interest in updated from them waned. I went from wanting to see everything they were doing, to only caring about major updates to software, to really only caring when something new joins the CNCF.
Also, as his followers over time follows more people, their feed will get saturated with tweets.
Consider a very simple model where the probability of "disengaging" in a given year is 50%, at which point the follower doesn't engage any more with your content (but they don't unfollow you). It doesn't matter what churn rate you pick, you still witness the same effect. And then assume that your follower count grows linearly by 1000 each year.
Time 0 1 2
Engage 1000 1500 1750
Follow 1000 2000 3000
Ratio 1 0.750 0.583
In fact, if you have a flat disengagement rate, as long as even a single person disengages without unfollowing, you will see this downward trend in engagement rates. Same assumptions as before, but this time, of the people that churn, 99% unfollow.
Time 0 1 2
Engage 1000 1500 1750
Follow 1000 1505 1762.5
Ratio 1 0.997 0.992
I don’t have any data to support this claim, but I’ve seen people posting more stories than regular posts, my wife usually closes the app after she’s done watching her latest stories. So, maybe likes are losing importance in instagram?
I think it's because users regard stories as acceptable for mundane, kind of boring, every day life content. Whereas singular posts come with greater expectations of quality or exceptionalism.
Most stories typically aren't worthy of being memorialized in a main profile page and since people are posting so frequently it seems natural it would drive engagement through the roof if you want to keep up with your friends socially. Thoughts?
Would be curious to see results of "private engagements" e.g. engagements on stories. Some of the top Twitter accounts I follow continuously tweet about the increase of DMs / private conversations on public posts. This would play into Mark Zuckerberg's vision of transitioning some of social media from the "town square" to the "living room". [1]
[1] https://www.facebook.com/FacebookforDevelopers/videos/f8-201...
Depending on how things are working behind the scenes, I could see your third scenario being related to what I've observed.
To be fair to them it's a tough Product situation. The majority of their advertisers are not savvy technical marketers who know the ins and outs of Ad Manager, have attribution solutions, etc. So in a sense, they need to overly simplify. But when you oversimplify things, require less technical setup of things like conversion tracking, etc., you tend to move further upstream from revenue-driving activity in the funnel, which can get very wasteful very quickly.
Thus engagement rate could be decreasing, but that doesn't say anything about the total average engagement of Instagram posts, which might be increasing. Possible reasons engagement rate is decreasing (but overall engagement rising):
1) The people who followed your brand in the early stages are your most enthusiastic fans and most likely to engage with your posts. Followers that hop on the bandwagon are less likely to engage, thus lowering your engagement rate. In effect, over time, your follower count will increase, but new followers will increase the denominator (number of followers) but won't increase the numerator (engagement).
2) Perhaps, there's been a rise in automated followers. Thus, your follower count has been increasing but most of it are bots, thus your engagement rate is decreasing.
3) Perhaps Instagram might be pushing more people to follow brands they don't want to engage with. Whether it's through algorithmic recommendations, or more ads that tell you to follow a brand.