Editorial: Selfie influencers face a shake-up, like it or not

Selena Gomez on the beach celebrating her best friend's engagement was the fifth most liked image on Instagram, according to a recent tally. Photo / Instagram

Editorial

EDITORIAL:

Could this be the end for social media "influencers"? Like, already?

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri announced in April that follower counts - Instagram's main status marker - would become much less prominent in users' profiles. This is a big shift for dedicated followers of fashion via social media.

If we can't see how many followers a beauty product poseur has, will we still buy that lippy? How would we even know whether this person was popular enough to pay attention to?

"A bigger idea," Mosseri posited, would be to have private "like counts", meaning no more numbers under posts.

But, one might hear social media consumers say: If we can't see how many people "liked" a post, how will we know whether we like it or not?

Earlier on, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey confessed: "If I had to start the service again, I would not emphasise the follower count as much. I would not emphasise the 'like' count as much. I don't think I would even create 'like' in the first place."

It's quite an about-face from the social media moguls, but one which may point more to wanting to keep this information for commercial exploitation, rather than being appalled by the cloying clamber for popularity by pervasive "selfie" posters.

Whatever the motive, could this signal the start of a whole new wave of social media behaviour - users thinking for themselves, rather than measuring their reactions based on how popular the "influencer" is, or how many "likes" that post had already attracted?

Like, that'd be a radical thing.