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Brian talks about the tweaks Instagram’s made to their time limit options.

Transcription

Instagram time limits, and your business.

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today we’re going to talk about the recent news. If you haven’t heard about it, what happened is that Instagram has come out. And well, let’s rewind a little bit and get you up to speed here.

Instagram, a while back came out around the same time, I believe Facebook did at the same time, they’re owned by the same company, which we call meta now.

They came out at the same time and said, Listen, we understand that people are addicted to social media.

What we’re going to do is make it easier for you to get off of your addiction, so to speak, um, I’m not using I’m not quoting that verbatim, but they said that we’re going to show you how you can back off.

We’re gonna allow you to set a timer on our apps to keep from being on there too long, right?

Well, they put it out there. Eventually, I’m not sure if it was right off the bat, or eventually, they had offerings for 10 minutes and 15 minutes, and 30 minutes and beyond.

Here’s what they found.

Somebody in the company found out that this is causing issues and they’ve quietly gotten rid of the 10 and 15-minute options.

Okay, yeah, think about this, What’s the problem with this?

There’s a whole there’s a whole litany of issues from their business perspective, how does it affect you as a business in terms of them a lot, only allowing people 30 minutes that well, allowing people to only limit themselves to 30 minutes, meaning that reasonably.

A, you could say that a certain amount of people are going to be on Instagram longer, right?

If you make money from Instagram, or is there any chance you’re going to see any of that change?

I doubt it, I highly doubt that that extra 15 minutes is going to make a change in your Instagram posts and likes and everything else that you all the all the things that you get from Instagram, even if you are just covering it, you’re there 24/7, but I’d love to hear it.

If you found that a huge boom, in recent days and weeks, because of this change, I’d love to hear about it.

I’d love to hear about how you know it comes back from that particular item. But here’s what you could learn from it.

I want you to learn from Mark Zuckerberg mistakes, okay, and I’m using him because he’s the, He’s the face that we relate back to it.

I don’t know if it had anything to do with him but here’s the first thing, as soon as you go down that road, and do it admit that what you have is an addictive substance.

I mean, look at what the tobacco companies did, when they, when they start to, hey, we know what we’re selling you is horrible. And we’re going to do everything we can we’re gonna put money into, you know, addiction programs, and we’re going to, we’re going to fund this and fund that. I mean, once you start joining in the crowd with saying that your product or service is bad for people, or has the potential to be bad for people.

That’s a tough, tough thing to balance.

I can’t imagine being in a situation where I would ever want to do that. I think it’s a mistake. I think it was a mistake on their part.

Not that it wouldn’t be true but I think it’s a mistake to join in on that, that there’s already going to be people from that perspective.

You know, pounding that drum.

So I don’t think it’s a good idea to go that way. If even if you do have something that’s bad, if you have something that’s bad for people, you got to find a way to make it better.

You know, find a way to make it work better, and everything else. Offering time limits on your service is limiting your own money. And when you limit your own money, you’re going against the engine your that your company runs off of.

So that’s really difficult to do and I’m not sure if they really looked at how is this chunk of time that we’re going to lose from these people?

How is this actually going to affect us?

Maybe at the time, it wasn’t a big deal.

Maybe with everything else falling behind. Supposedly behind the scenes at meta, Facebook, Instagram, maybe with all everything else kind of floundering.

They’re grasping at straws, trying to find anything that could possibly turn things around and make things more positive for them. And so they come up with this.

The problem is, they don’t announce it, they don’t say anything about it.

They don’t say why they’re doing it, people start catching it, then they start reporting on it, then they start doing YouTube videos and podcasts like I am right now.

It ends up getting worse and worse and worse. Learn from Instagrams mistakes, don’t Institute something that you think you’re going to have to pull back later. And if you if you do think you might have to pull it back later have a good reason why you’re pulling it back later, have a story ready to go before you even Institute it.

These are things you have to think about ahead of time. If you can’t communicate properly with people, that trust factor gets less and less and less and less, as we’ve seen with the situation at Netta.

That trust factor is not coming back until they get a spokesperson that people can relate with on a human level. Or at least have half of the people be willing to defend the person.

There’s not a whole lot of defenders for Mark Zuckerberg, he’s, he’s he’s just a strange person. And he doesn’t give off warmth at all.

That’s very difficult to have when you’re dealing with a spokesperson with the face of your company. They’re going to need somebody to help with this PR situation. Or it’s going to get worse and worse and worse.

Don’t make these mistakes, watch for them from other companies. And be wary in your own company as you’re growing.

So hopefully that’s helpful to go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

That’s more long-term strategy. These are short-term strategies, especially for larger companies that we’re talking about today.

But if you’re on your way to becoming a larger company and you want to be able to beat the larger companies, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. You can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com That’s all I have for tonight.

You have a good one. We’ll see you tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.