Should You Hide Likes On Instagram?
When posting content on your Instagram feed it can be a super rewarding and thrilling experience to see the likes flood in from your followers. But it can also make you feel the exact opposite when your posts aren’t as successful and make you feel as if your content isn’t good enough, this can also fuel low moods and anxiety in many users. To combat this problem, Instagram brought out the ability to hide your likes.
This new feature has left many users and businesses with the question, should you hide your likes on Instagram?
Will hiding your likes on Instagram affect the performance of your posts?
On Instagram’s end, not really. You can hide likes from yourself and other users, but the app will still track likes and use them as a ranking signal for the algorithm.
In short, the algorithm decides what content you see first (on Stories, Posts and the Explore page). How the order is determined is specific to the individual; it depends on what you like, watch and comment on, so hiding your likes won’t directly affect the performance of what you’re posting.
Whilst hiding your likes may not impact your engagement when it comes to the algorithm, there are other factors that could be affected. For instance, users may see you as being less transparent, just like disabling comments feels suspicious to some users, there is a chance hiding likes could provoke uneasiness in customers. Followers might automatically assume that hiding likes mean there’s something wrong with the content or even the brand.
How to still track your Instagram likes (even if they’re hidden)
Instagram’s in-app analytics solution offers an overview of your account’s metrics, including information on how many accounts you’ve reached, the demographics of your audience, how your follower count is growing — and how many likes your posts get.
To view Instagram’s Insights, you need to have a Business or Creator profile
From your creator or business, profile tap the ‘Professional dashboard’ button underneath your bio.
From there, click the ‘See all’ button at the top right of the page. This will take you to the ‘Overview’ page, on this page, scroll down to the ‘Content you’ve shared section and select ‘Posts’.
Once here, make sure that you select the date range, post type and metric you want to track, but select ‘Likes’ under the metrics dropdown in this instance. And voila! Now you can see how many likes your posts have achieved, even the posts that have their likes hidden!
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