Another sad day for influencers who like to brag about their vanity metrics!

Following the move of Instagram, Facebook will start testing removing Like counts from posts. The test’s goal aligns with Facebook’s broader focus of ensuring that the time spent on Facebook is time well spent.

For one thing, this means that the social media sphere will no longer be the same. Marketers will have to start re-evaluating their success metrics by paying less attention to vanity metrics, but rather look at the broader benefit of social media against their marketing goals. This is especially true when it comes to influencer partnership programs.

Besides, it looks like there is a current trend from social media platforms to minimize the focus on profiles’ public rankings & engagement. This is clear seeing Facebook and Instagram testing the removal of Likes and YouTube’s latest announcement of phasing out subscriber counts.

Read more here.