Facebook and Instagram are Indirectly Aggravating Businesses
Facebook and Instagram care about their user’s health. Jesse Damiani from Forbes recently let everyone know that these well-known social media sites have introduced a time tracking feature that allows its users to know how long they’ve been on the site/application. With the additional ability to set time limits, but no “hard stops”, people can now control their social media addiction, Damiani reports in “Facebook And Instagram Just Introduced A Time-Tracking Feature”. While all of this may make their regular and addicted users happy, I believe it might be detrimental for businesses, making them unsettled and concerned.
Simply put: fewer users actually using these social medias mean less of an audience, and ultimately customers, for businesses. Businesses nowadays use social media to mainly advertise and connect with their consumers, so, for example, when their audience gets notified of their average 46 minutes a day usage of the social media site and decides to cut down on this drastically, the businesses will also be negatively impacted. To put it more into perspective, if before this feature an advertisement was seen by 1,000 avid Facebook users, that statistic might now be cut in half after the majority of them see how much time they’ve been actually using the site and decide to cut down on that, missing the advertisement altogether. Fewer viewers of an advertisement ultimately mean fewer customers and traffic for that business, lowering their revenue immensely. Additionally, when businesses launch a new product or sale it might be harder for all of their consumers and potential consumers to be notified if they’re restricting their original means of notification. Because of this, businesses might have to invest in and look into other means of advertising and connecting with their consumers, which can possibly be a more direct method.
So, while this feature is meant to improve the lives of many Facebook and Instagram users, it might just ruin many businesses in the process. On the other hand, it could cause businesses to go back to their previous means of advertising and connecting or branch out and find new methods, which can just harm these social medias themselves.