Instagram has a high level goal of increasing Revenue (total and ARPU), Engagement (posting, sharing, commenting, liking) and DAUs/WAUs

With that said, I would define the goal of Blue check marks to contribute to one or more of the above metrics. The one that makes the most sense for me is engagement.

State the goal – As I understand, one of the most important goals for the Blue Check Mark (BCM) is to increase engagement for the users with the BCM but also for IG as a platform.

I would focus on the below metrics:

1. Number of users with a BCM – While this metric is something that is controlled directly by IG (since they approve/verify) BCM users, it would still give me a sense of the use of the feature
2. Number of followers per BCM account – engagement on an account is very highly correlated to the number of followers. This will also help me get a sense of the quality of the BCM user profiles/content. (Better content = more followers)
3. Number of engagement per BCM account (over some time period) – This helps me get a sense of the egnagement these accounts are driving for IG
4. Number of engagement per post/reel/story from a BCM account – This should give us a good sense of the quality of the content being posted. It also gives me an opportunity to identify the 20% BCM accounts that are driving 80%of BCM engagement. If there are certain types of posts/behaviours that these accounts display, maybe we can create featrues to encourage that behaviour

I would also like to look at the incrementality that the BCM accounts drive for the entire platform, so maybe create a cohort of users who are engaging with a 10+ BCM posts a day. Analyse if these users have higher engagement on all of IG than the rest of the platform. If yes, then this might be a signal for me to make awareness/discovery of BCM accounts even more easier.

Tradeoffs:

1. The above metrics have no direct way of measuring the quality of the BCM users and the content they produce. However, #2,3,4 above will act as a good proxy for that.
2. No way to ensure that the content from these accounts is not offensive/inappropriate/illegal, etc. I will look at the number of “report account/content” for BCM accounts and validate if this is a big enough problem to worry about.
3. Quality of engagement – I feel a lot of the BCM posts have comments that are unrelated and low quality(like “please follow me”, “I was the first to comment”). So maybe have a deeper metric for #4 above which looks at an extra dimension of “Number of high quality engagement per post/reel/story from a BCM account” High quality can be defined as likes, comments with likes/replies.
4. The last aspect that the above doesnt cover is #of new follows because of BCM accounts. Since there is a lot of engagement on BCM posts, maybe users discover other non BCM accounts with similar interests and start following them. So I’d make #3 a little broader to also include “follow requests” that could be attributed to BCM related posts.

First I’d like to better understand our customers and their pain points. Second, I’d like to understand how this feature fits into IG’s mission. Third, I’d like to go through customer journey and brainstorm metrics

Feature Description:

A verified badge is a check mark that appears next to IG account’s name in profile and in search.

It means that IG has confirmed that the account is authentic and it belongs to the public figure, celebrity, or a global brand

Business Goal:

IG’s mission is to capture and share world’s moments

When IG users follow public figures, they want to be confident that the content posted by the public figure is authentic and it doesn’t spoil user’s trust in IG

Product Goal:

Since this is a mature feature, I’m assuming the goal of the product is to increase engagement

Personas:

Public Figure, IG User

Customer journey:

Public Figure:

1. Create IG Profile
2. Add Pics, description
3. Request Verification from IG
4. Get Verified
5. Get Rejected
6. Continue to post content on IG

IG Users:

1. search and see verfied accounts vs. un-verified accounts in search results
2. Follow verified public figures in IG
3. Un-follow un-verified (fake) accounts

Tactical Metrics:

# of verified account requests MoM

# of new verified accounts MoM

# no of rejected requests

# no. of pending requests

# ratio of verified to unverified accounts for public figures

# % of time verified accounts showing in search relevance vs. un-verified accounts

# % of user following verified accounts vs. un-verified accounts for public figures

North Star:

No. of verified account follows MoM

Counter Metric:

1. no. of un-verified accounts MoM
2. Time taken to verify accounts

Risk:

1. Fraud/Fake accounts

Clarify:

• What is blue check mark
  • The blue check mark is used to verify users, people, biz, brand, celeb.
  • Any benefits
    • Trust
    • Link in stories?
• My framework is
  1. think on the feature missions align with ig missions, of course facebook mission.
  2. What’s core actions and benefits for the account being verified and viewers
  3. Then define the metrics for actions, two buckets, Feature level metrics, Top-level mission metrics
  4. Pick one of several that matters the most of each bucket
  5. Evaluate the trade-offs of success metrics.

GOALS/ MISSIONS

• Blue check Product Vision
  • Provide authenticity and trust for verified accounts, to encourage safer and more trustworthy sharing and interactions
• IG Mission: To capture and share the world’s moments
• FB mission: empower build communities and bring people closer together.
• Why align with IG mission:
  • Trustworthy of IG leads to the trustworthiness of verified branded by ig, so that the viewer will feel safe when interacting with the accounts. which will lead to more engagement
    • Successfully verify the RIGHT accounts, will also lead the user to trust IG and blue dot more.
  • More interacting with verified accounts to lead to account share more.
  • Share links in the stories can
  • All these help missions
• Why align with FB mission
  • Each account and connection forms a community, having police of ig to set the rule and manage the user communities is a good tool t build communities.
  • Trust and safe bring people closer.

Core Actions & Metrics

Feature actions and buckets

• Verified Account ( VA)
  • Is the overall verification efficiency
    • Time to request – Time get verified , overall time of verifcaiton is okay
    • NPS score:
  • Is the featured Adoption
    • # VA
    • Ratio of verified account /qualified account
    • VA growth/all user growth/qualified account growth
  • Encourage sharing and capturing
    • Interactions/Views per VA and per posts
    • Average followers/posts/stories per VA
    • Retention for VA/non-VA
    • Links added to stories
  • Is Trustworthy:
    • Report ratio: Account being verified but being reported
• Viewers
  • Encourage interactions?
    • Search CTR with results of VA and non-VA
    • Average post viewed/Interaction by VA and non-VA
    • Average CTR by VA and non – VA
  • How many users engaged with VA
    • View, Comment, like and shares of post by VA

Mission buckets

• Content creation: Posts Shared/Viewed from VA
• Increase engagement: # engaged user by VA/total active user on IG.

One metric

• Increase engagement: # engaged user by VA/total active user on IG.
  • Counter metric: account being reported/account being verified.

Trade-off

• Choose engagement over trust can lead to recommendation may prioritize account of VA rank higher,
• Didn’t mean the users are more satisfied with overall engagement, as Business /Ad are probably the account being verified, but people want to see the posts from their friends more.

I would start off by talking about the goals of this feature.

What’s the goal of Instagram with blue check marks? What does it aim to achieve? For the purpose of this question, I am assuming that Instagram wants to verify celebrities/famous people/brands as the original profile that differentiates them from fake profiles or other fan groups. It’s also to develop trust and credibility amongst Instagram users.

The mission of Facebook is to connect people across the globe. Instagram, which is a part of Facebook wants users to connect with brands and the celebrities. Celebrities and famous people also want to connect with their fans and followers. Instagram is a medium through which they can connect with their fans and followers and also post important/meaningful updates about them. They don’t want their fans to follow fake profiles, who spread wrong information about celebrities and give rise to fake news. Hence, credibility and developing trust is important for Instagram.

Goals: The goal of Instagram via this feature is to verify profiles of celebrities/famous people/brands so that users can interact with the real person/brand and not a fake profile. Instagram also wants to give celebrities/brands the platform to interact directly with their followers. Instagram also aims to develop credibility and trust through this feature. Because people use what they trust. So, the goal is user retention and customer engagement.

Now, I would like to talk a bit about how this feature works. The user searches for a famous person. Let’s say Barack Obama. A list of search results show up. The verified profile with the blue check mark shows at the top of the search results. This tells the user that it’s the real profile and the user can go ahead to follow the person.

Actions: Now I will talk about the various actions that a user will take

1. Searching for a brand/celebrity and clicking on the search result with the blue checkmark.

2.Following the person/brand with blue check mark.

3.More celebrities/famous brands joining Instagram and using the blue check marks to interact with their followers.

Metrics: Discoverability/Visibility is important. It’s important that when users look up for a celebrity/brand they follow, they see the verified profile as the top result. So, I would like to measure the average click through rate for verified profiles . Second metric will be to compare the average number of CTR for verified vs non-verified profile(separate, not combined) for the same person/brand. Because customers would like to follow the verified users.

Trade-offs: Measuring customer engagement will be challenging because that depends on the number of posts by the verified user. If the verified user is not posting content, customer engagement will be lesser. Second, CTR for a non-verified profile can be more if that profile is posting more content/images. So, it’s not a sure shot for success.