Dude, Where's My Likes?!

Where digital meets travel + lifestyle … A collection of can’t-miss news from this week, including social media marketing trends. Sign up to get the TURNER Weekly Download in your inbox every Friday.

Shop Insta

Instagram is a place people go to check out photos and videos. But increasingly, Instagram is becoming a place where they are shopping. This year, the Facebook-owned platform has rolled out new retail tools that make it easy for brands and consumers to interact. A new checkout option allows customers to purchase products directly off several companies' pages within the app. And you can now buy items via the Stories and Explore features, making it easy to get the looks of celebrities and influencers. “What the internet hasn't been particularly good at is solving for discovery and window shopping," Andrew Lipsman, analyst at eMarketer, told CNN. "Instagram is starting to help fill that need for shoppers.”

Dude, Where’s My Likes?!

To the horror of influencers everywhere, Instagram threatened to hide “Likes” earlier this year. And now, they’ve started experimented with actually doing it. Yikes! Millions of users in Canada, Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand have seen one of their most important metrics disappear. Petapixel has the details. “Removing likes is an easy way to kill two birds with one stone,” write the editors. “Not only does it look like the platform is making a change that would be better for its users’ mental health, they’re also leveling the playing field with Influencers and encouraging brands to work through Instagram if they want to advertise their goods on the platform.”

SEO De-Optimization

Embedding Instagram posts on websites has been an easy way for brands to showcase influencer content. But is it hurting your SEO? Google warns that it is. According to Search Engine Roundtable, “if you use Instagram and use Instagram's embed code, Google most likely will not rank the image on your site in image search.” Google image search is one of the more powerful traffic drivers out there. So, brands may want to consider posting influencer images when possible, rather than the Instagram embed itself.

Follower Fraud

We look at major celebrities’ Instagram follower counts with envy. But how many of those followers are real? According to a new study, fake followers and bots could cost advertisers upwards of $1.3 billion this year. It’s not all bad news, however. It just means that brand are going to have to pay closer attention to the influencers they work with. “Say the person has 70,000 followers and they get 100 likes and zero comments per post — that red flag should go up,” Mae Karwowski, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Obviously, told CNBC.

Weekly Moment of Zen

Follow these dogs on Instagram! You won’t regret it.