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In the beginning, it was just a cool way of letting someone know that you enjoyed their post. Aggregated, it has become proof that a person is indeed popular. The people who need this most are ‘Influencers’ who make a ton of money because brands believe they have the ears of their precious consumers.

The fact that more than 75% of children would rather be YouTubers and Vloggers than doctors and nurses is proof of how popular being popular has become. But there is always going to be an imminent danger if your business model is 100% reliant on someone else’s business. In this case, influencers will only stay profitable if social media giants continue to permit it, but that could soon change.

To social media giants, influencers are becoming ad-revenue competitors; splitting for share of ad spend with them. This is true because marketing budgets are split between the platforms and influencers and the amounts going to influencers recently are too huge to stay indifferent.

As in every other case, when an asset becomes more of a liability, measures are taken to ‘manage’ it. So small wonder that Facebook has already started hiding likes, reaction and video view counts; signs of the times. Eventually, this development will be as relevant in New York as in Accra or Lagos because the basis for influencer charges are pretty much standard. Facebook gives an altruistic reason for this, but I am really skeptical.

Does this mean the death of influencers? Nope, not all of them. In fact, with many brands getting more value from nano influencers (with a fraction of the following of mega influencers have), things are already in motion. Many brands are now choosing to partner 100 influencers with a 1000 followers each than 1 influencer with 100k followers.

So when social media giants fully migrate to taking back their lunch from mega influencers, they won’t get all of it, advertisers will look for and find smaller influencers with clear/strong authenticity. This will be a truer form of ‘word of mouth’ from someone I trust than what happens with a mega influencer.

Of course, brands will also take a hit because it will be harder to evaluate performance of posts, but it won’t be new as really, whoever ‘Liked’ a TV/Radio ad as they watched or listened? They will always find a way to measure metrics that matter.

So if you’re an influencer or plan to be one, re-evaluate your mid-long term strategy.

PS: Originally written in Oct 2019 @ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-removing-like-button-who-suffers-most-benjamin-anyan/

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