How Thai digital marketing agency adjust themselves to the like-hiding on Instagram

platform.

Introduction
In the age of digital disruption, many companies both large and small need to improve
and develop their online marketing strategies which aim to develop profitable and effective work
matters. Many Thai businesses relies on digital marketing agency to take care of their online
marketing activities. The digital marketing agency comes into any business like their partners
and consultants about endless marketing tactics to pursue. One of many services digital
marketing agencies provided to their clients is about the brand’s appearance on social media
platform. The social photo-sharing app like Instagram is one of the platforms that many
businesses aim to use because it can spread the advertisement and create the viral by using its
features. According to the news article “Instagram expands hiding ‘likes’ to make you happier”,
this article discussed about new Instagram’s features that hide the Likes count in order to
improve user’s mental health and make people feel more confidence with their social network
profile without comparing to others. Hence, this research paper will discuss and analyze this
change in the perspective of how Thai digital marketing agency needs to adjust themselves
toward the change.

Research & Background

Digital marketing
Digital marketing is different from traditional marketing in the way of approaching
customers. It is the use of the internet, social media, search engines, electronic devices in order to
connect with current and prospective consumers. There are many digital tools, tactics, strategies
and channels to perform the digital marketing which need to be suited with such businesses and
goals. Any marketers in every business field should be familiar with these marketing terms and
buzz words like SEO, Pay Per Click Advertising, video marketing, inbound marketing, affiliate
marketing and influencer marketing to name a few.
Digital marketing can be applied to various businesses in any industry from B2B to B2C
(Lucy A., 2019). The challenges of digital marketing are the fast-paced updated of all channels,
thus, every marketer for all business must keep up with this trend and be outstanding among
huge amount of data that people scrolled each day (Adam B., 2019).  
The role of digital marketing to any businesses is mainly to create the electronic and
online business activities. Digital marketing is important to business in term of brand awareness
and online presence (Lucy A.,2019). People who take care of this job is called digital marketers.
They have the ability to define how digital marketing activities support business’s goals and
directions. The companies can decide to manage their marketing in-house or work with agency.

Agency marketing
 Agency marketing is a path to marketing that necessitate with hiring an outsource or third
party to handle with marketing activities and campaigns (Jamie F., 2019). The marketing agency
companies have the full-loop marketing services from initialize marketing strategies that align
with business directions, plan, create and promote their client’s products and services through
marketing and advertising both online and offline depend on their strengths or client’s
requirements. Most agencies are well connected and have many talented, experts and creativity
about marketing activities in their team members, they can help their clients execute and launch
campaign on time, they can use their experience to minimize any obstacles that might happen in
the campaign. Therefore, the service fee is quite large which might not suitable with small to
medium enterprises. However, marketing agencies usually have many clients, so they have to
deal with many kinds of businesses in various industry, they might take time to get familiar with
the clients. Once the company decide to hire a marketing agency, the company may have a
minimal right, control and access to the content and campaign creation process.

Instagram’s algorithm
Instagram is a social photo-sharing application that allows users to post photo and video,
follow friends and see their posted media. At first, Instagram only allowing a square-sized
picture and applicable for iOS only. It keeps improved from time to time then was acquired by
Facebook in 2015. Instagram has been developed and changed a lot including the application
interfaces, content policies, and algorithm. Instagram used to show the timeline feed by time, or
it is called chronological feed, but now the feed posts are arranged by 6 key factors which are
interest, relationship, timeliness, frequency, following and usage (Jillian W., 2020). Behind the
Instagram’s algorithm, there are huge amount of data and the application is learning from that
every day, which is called machine learning. The feed’s ranking is adapting based on new
coming data. Instagram’s algorithm even knows the fake interactions like bombing of hashtags
in comment box, using bot and comment pods.
The first factor of new Instagram’s algorithm is interest which is the users’ past behavior
toward any posts and combine with system’s analysis on the actual content. It also counts the
interaction with other user and the most important engagement are comments, likes, reshares and
video views. Next factor is how Instagram determines the relationship between users. The
algorithm possibly can figure out the relationship based on content user like, direct message,
search box and real relationship in real life (Thomas D, 2018). Instagram’s algorithm also
concerns about how long the photo was posted in order to arranged on user’s timeline. The
frequency of using the application is also counted, if that users check out Instagram more often,
the timeline feed will look more chronological. In contrast, if the users are less checking,
Instagram will determine and decides which post you will like. The numbers of following
account are also one key factor to provide more options for Instagram choose which posts to
show, so it means that users will not see every post from every account they followed.
Instagram advertising
According to Statista (2018), Instagram has over one billion active account. So,
Instagram is one of many social media platforms that worth to invest in advertisement. Instagram
provide a various advertisement format like photo, videos and the new features like IG Stories
and IGTV that being as the powerful tools to make the advertisement. Instagram advertising is
about paying for the platform in order to spread out the content to reach a larger targeted
audience as well as more control over who can see the post. The reason why many businesses
love to use Instagram platform as the advertisement channel because 75% of active users is the
younger audience group at the age of 18 to 24 years old (Tony T., 2020). The Instagram
advertisement can increase the brand presence, generate new leads, accelerate website traffic and
convert those leads into real customers (Margot W, 2020). According to the Instagram
Advertising, over 60% of users mentioned that they found new products on the platform and
more than 200 million users visit business profile every day. Moreover, the most view Instagram
stories come from business profile for around 33%.
Once the marketers decided to promote business on Instagram platform, they can manage
to target specific genders, age group, locations, user’s interest and behavior as well as lookalike
audience which means that the advertisement will likely show to those who have similar
audience’s requirements. Instagram advertisement is more powerful with the business that
related to visual media such as a fashion business, restaurant business, art and craft business.

Cause
Instagram aims to reduce the psychological impact of social media on people’s self-esteem
especially the younger group of users.
The main reason why the Instagram launched the ‘private likes’ feature on the platform is
because of the issues about psychological impact toward the younger group of active users. Since
the majority of active users on this platform is youngster, so the Instagram had launched many
policies in order to make the platform safer for young people and aims to be as a positive online
community platform. On dates, the number of the young generations who feel more anxious, less
esteem and pressure since they are growing up and spending most of their time on social media
is rising (Rachel E.,2020). Monica A. and Jingjing J. (2018) mentioned that even though the
majority of teens claim that social media makes them feel more connected with their friends and
family but almost half of them also feel overwhelmed with drama and feel pressure to be
someone in these virtual society, including which photo or status to be posted or the number of
comments and likes.
Many digital marketing agencies rely on the engagement which included likes in order to
measure the successful of marketing campaign.
The ‘private likes’ feature is going to affect the marketers and brands because the public
numbers that indicate the popularity of the Instagram posts are likes, comments and followers, if
some number is missing then it means a lot of work to find out other measurement and show the
impact of posted media. Hence, the marketers should illustrate other measurement and back-end
statistics to show the performance of posted media like the traffic, number of applications
installed, video views, lead generation, number of direct messages and conversion.

Consequence
Good consequences
For Instagram users – The hiding-like feature could be the initial point of confidence and
lift the self-esteem up for Instagram users, especially the younger generation that they can post
any media they want to without concern about the number of ‘likes’ they are going to get. They
will feel less pressure and less insecure or comparing themselves with others.

For digital marketing agencies - The consequence from ‘likes removal’ means that the
ability to create the marketing campaign that higher in quality and meet the real brand objectives.
It might be a hard time for marketers, but it could also result in more authentic and creativity in
content and improving the customer’s experiences in the same time.

Bad consequences
For digital marketing agencies – One of the social media marketing strategies is to invest
in influencers’ marketing. The hiding-like feature can make it more difficult for digital marketers
to find the proper influencers to work with. Many marketing agencies mentioned that when they
have listed the influencer’s account to their clients, one question that will come up is how much
likes those influencers got in the posted media. Therefore, if the like-hiding feature is officially
applied worldwide, it could be harder to measure how engaged between influencers and their
followers.

Short-term consequences
For digital marketing agencies - The consequence from this change has the effect to the
digital marketing agencies in the way of measurement of such marketing campaign on the
platforms. They have to explore the alternative performance measurement metrics that not focus
only about the platform’s statistical data but shifting to create a more long-term partnerships and
collect extra insights from posted contents by agencies and do not only rely on the platform.
Another way to promote the products and services is to learn to use the Instagram Stories and
IGTV features which can have success with promoted content without showing number of likes.

For the key opinion leader industry - This industry is quite unique because it mostly
depends on social media platform. Once the platform is changed, the industry has to be adjusted
themselves as well. Many KOL and influencers were worried about the change because most of
them were started with personal account profile, and they built their engagement around their
communities then their profiles became the personal branding. There will be the content
disruption for the influencers in order to communicate value to their partner. They can start with
produces high-quality content consistently for their followers. Then, they should build their own
strong connection and legacy with their followers that allow them to engage and interact with
audiences in real-time in order to add value to their accounts.
Long-term consequences
For Instagram’s users - It could take some more time to see the improvement of the self-
confidence and self-expression of the platform's users, but people might see the good sign from
the policy. It can also reduce the self-anxiety and social-pressure in order to gain trust from
users’ friends and fit into their society.

For society - There are many researches about the harmful effects of social media on
younger generation, since they were born and grew up with the fast-paced technology and social
media. It might be unclear that the harmful effects caused by social media, but it can be useful if
a big company concern about the policy to elevate the society. If other social media company
launch this kind of policy, it could be good for users and it can disperse the positive impact to
society as well.

Opinion
In summary, the like-hiding feature might affect the local digital marketing agencies in
the measurement aspect if they still rely on the public numbers of engagement statistics such as
likes, comments and numbers of followers. The digital marketing agencies and marketers should
explore and establish the alternative way of measure the performance of published media on
platforms. The responsible marketers and advertisers should already be employing new strategies
that focus on measuring ROI through other metrics like relevant audience, meaningful
engagement and potential lead generation.
For the society’s perspective, the purpose of Instagram’s hiding-like is to minimize the
psychological issues from social media platforms of younger group and to improve the mental
health of their user as well. According to NapoleonCat (2020), the majority group of Instagram
users in Thailand is at the age between 18 and 24 for 36.8% and the number of youngers group
continue to grow gradually. Therefore, the proactive way to maintain the mental health of young
people toward the social media is the good start and need to keep track of how impact to the
users.
References
Lucy Alexander, 2019 "The Who, What, Why, & How of Digital Marketing"
Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-digital-marketing
Adam Barone, March 28, 2020 “Digital Marketing”
Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/digital-marketing.asp
Jamie Fisher, February 8, 2019 “Which is better: In-House or Agency Marketing? ”
Retrieved from https://medium.com/trapica/in-house-vs-agency-marketing-which-one-is-better-
for-your-business-369eb531c911
Jillian Warren, February 3, 2020 “This is how the Instagram Algorithm works in 2020”
Retrieved from https://later.com/blog/how-instagram-algorithm-works/
Thomas Dimson, February 10, 2017 “Machine Learning @Scale – Measurement and
analysis of prediction” Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/watch/?
v=1856120757994353
Statista, 2018 “Number of monthly active Instagram users from January 2013 to June
2018” Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/253577/number-of-monthly-active-
instagram-users/
Tony Tran, February 4,2020 “Instagram Demographics That Matter to Social Media
Marketers in 2020” Retrieved from https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-demographics/
Margit Whitney, April 12,2020 “The complete guide to advertising on Instagram”
Retrieved from https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/11/20/instagram-advertising
Instagram Advertising, “Build your business on Instagram.”
Retrieved from https://business.instagram.com/advertising/
Rachel Ehmke, 2020 “How using Social Media Affects Teenagers”
Retrieved from https://childmind.org/article/how-using-social-media-affects-teenagers/
Monica Anderson and Jingjing Jiang (November 28,2018) “Teens and their experiences
on social media”
Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/11/28/teens-and-their-experiences-
on-social-media/
NapoleonCat (March, 2020) “Instagram users in Thailand”
Retrieved from https://napoleoncat.com/stats/instagram-users-in-thailand/2020/03
Marketing practices through Instagram platform without like-counts – the measurements
about content quality on Instagram platform.

Introduction

Research & Background

Instagram as a marketing channel

Content Quality
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-metrics/

Engagement Rate per follower

Follower Growth

Comment Received

Hashtag and Impressions

Reach

Referral Traffic

Instagram Stories Performance

Cause

Consequence

Opinion
References
Instagram marketing tactics – how to elevate the brand’s story without showing like-
counts.

Introduction

Research & Background

Cause

Consequence

Opinion

References