Hello Reptile Entrepreneurs! It has been quite the last week in the social media world and these events are substantial enough that we need to at least be aware of the implications and how they affect us.

The biggest news is the apparent melt down of Twitter. If you haven’t been following the drama then you ought to give it a little attention. It is the story of Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla Motors, purchasing Twitter and cleaning house. And by cleaning house I mean firing or driving away the employees. Elon Musk is currently presiding over the collapse of the entire social media platform of Twitter. While Twitter may or may not be a substantial component in your social media portfolio I want to raise the warning of how quickly it went from business as usual to a complete collapse. Elon Musk has gone on a firing rampage and is now directing the remaining employees to answer an online questionnaire which asks, yes or no, whether they are going to sign on to a “hardcore” culture that promises long hours at high intensity. They had three days to make up their mind And if they selected no it was counted as a resignation. It remains to be seen how many employees sign on to, in no uncertain terms, be abused by their boss. I imagine the people left will be the ones who are stuck in the immigration process and are frightened by the prospects of losing their job right before a looming recession. But we all know what happens when management has grand ideas of how to expand their business while reducing staff. Looks good on paper if you don’t consider your employees human and bet on them feeling so trapped that they will take abuse. I do not know what the result of this ultimatum will be. This episode will launch on the next business day after the ultimatum deadline. So we can all watch the drama together.

But how does this affect us small time entrepreneurs? Well, it is time I brought back a recurring theme of this podcast. And that is of diversifying your social media outreach. Whether it is the Instagram AI deciding your account should be shut down in the middle of the night, or Youtube deciding to demonetize your video, or, the entire social media platform disappearing you want to take advantage of every opportunity, but not be totally dependent on these platforms.

Our recent history is rich with warnings of what can happen. People grew to stardom on the social media platform Vine…and then the parent company, which was, ironically, Twitter, announced it was simply shutting it down. Tumblr changed hands a couple of times and was beaten to a pulp to the point where was assumed dead. There is still life there, but you have to take side streets to get there. And how about TikTok? Wait, why are we talking about the fastest growing social media platform in this depressing episode? Well, TikTok is part of Bytedance which is a Chinese company. There is more and more bipartisan noise in the US government about concerns of how the Chinese government is gathering data and how they can influence the 80 million active users in the US. The director of the FBI has announced serious concern for the data that the Chinese government has access to. Although TikTok says they don’t share information there is zero weight behind that as the government is involved in any sizable business in China. The trump administration sought to simply ban the app. The Biden administration was looking for a way that data could be stored here in the US. Your take away I that both democrats and republicans have TikTok in their sights. What is the probability that TikTok just ceases to exist in the US and whatever countries share the same concerns? I don’t know. I would assume that Bytedance would rather sell TikTok USA than just shut it down. But what that would look like is unclear. The point is, once again, that the current social media landscape is fluid. It always has been. The big names have always been in motion. Friendster…MySpace…Vine… Do you even remember or did you ever know these existed?

Right now, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube seem stable. Sure,  Facebook is in decline, but it would have to lose 50% of its user base before TikTok could match it. That is how big it is. So, yes, the main US three seem stable. Of course, is Facebook or Instagram ever out of the news in a bad way? The Federal Trade Commission is methodically working through anti-trust charges against Meta. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has aggressively purchased competition or copied them into submission. This has not escaped the notice of Washington and there continues to be building momentum for keeping the massively powerful tech world in check in some manner. This is one reason for the 67 lobbyists that Facebook has employed and the $5 million it spends every year (and growing) to defend themselves and throw TikTok under the bus. It has been interesting watching Meta falling all over itself to tightly integrate Facebook and Instagram to try and show that they can’t be separated. But, politics aside, the big question would be what would a split mean for us and our businesses that have been built to rely, at least partially, on Instagram as an outreach or marketing tool.

I actually don’t think the split would be a bad thing for us. There may be some chaos during the transition, but we would have to see what vision the new leaders would have before we could tell if we would be affected.  Ironically, Instagram’s constant changing of what they want to see from us to get any sort of reach has prepared us for any 180 shift in direction that may be thrown at us. If you have held on with Instagram through the last couple of years then chaos and uncertainty are already your friends. But what the end result would be is anyone’s guess. Will all of us who painfully adjusted to a reels-centric outreach find we have to change our strategy again? Well, I guess, bring it on. It can’t be any worse than what we went through to get where we are today.

The other thing that would help buffer your business or outreach from this uncertainty is developing your other outreach efforts. In particular, a website. I know I keep harping on a website, but it really is a place you can finally call home. In fact, it is so important, and I recognize it to be so intimidating, that 2023 is going to be a focus on websites and search engines. I know I said Q4 2022 would be the website focus, but I am afraid I got a much better idea and so I needed to switch gears.   That, and my required topic list grew way beyond what could be contained in the last part of the year!                               

Speaking of which, we are coming to the end of the year where I take a break from my podcasts and production to refresh and reset. Although these rest periods usually are actually filled with preparations for next season and this downtime will be very busy as season 3 in 2023 will go right back to being weekly and we will hit the whole internet home base concept hard.

But I wanted to have one more episode for season 2. And this is where I want to hear from anyone who has listened to this podcast and has done something with it. What have you accomplished that was inspired by listening to some episode. Please let me know because I would like to put together an episode sharing how far we have come. Do you remember me asking you to take a screen shot of your Instagram account followers at the beginning of the year? Well, now is the time to take another screen shot of your profile and send them to me either on the Retile Entrepreneur Instagram account or to bill@reptileentrepreneur.com. I, of course, will share mine! And if it isn’t that much of growth, don’t worry about it. That happened across Instagram. I monitor the largest accounts in my niche and I can tell you that we started off where growth was somewhat evenly spread out over the accounts. But by summer the growth was only in a couple accounts and everyone else was crawling forward at a glacial pace until I gave up monitoring it weekly and went to a monthly check. That is okay. We are all under the same conditions and the important thing is that we are still here in the fight. Anyone doing this long term knows the fat times come and the lean times come. What is important is that you position yourself to get as much as you can during the good times and be smart enough to save it to support you through the lean times. That is how we make it year after year.