“If you feel the need to constantly post on social media documenting your every move, chances are you’re either addicted to social networking or there is a void somewhere in your personal life.” — Germany Kent

Are Social Media “Stories” eating your wallet?

Let's find out.

Stories give a unique kind of true-to-life experience to Instagram and Facebook users. Before Instagram incorporated and hooked millions of users to it (Yes, close to 500 million people use the “Stories” daily), it was already a buzzing feature on Snapchat. So, all Instagram had to do was garnish this magnetic feature at the top of its dazzling main course! We all are aware about the global addiction with Tiktok and YouTube reels, but LinkedIn is perceived as a professional no-nonsense platform to grow your network and progress in your career, so when “Stories” made their debut on LinkedIn, it made me think that they are certainly more than just a daily dose of dopamine for us. They are heavily leveraged by companies and brands to eat consumer wallets piece by piece. In this article, I have pinpointed exactly why “Stories” are the go-to option to display activities/ads/content regularly and how this addiction is leading to a scalable shopping pattern. Towards the end, I will also share some personal tips and tricks to save yourself from spending your time and money on social media platforms.

Why are “Stories” so famous?

• It’s a cakewalk!—How many seconds does it take to post one story on Instagram? Less than a minute right? Remember the old days when we used to struggle to find the right captions, descriptions, pre-process the pictures to apply “ cool” filters to the images, add background music score, and so on and so forth. But now all of this happens in just a matter of seconds. The simplicity and ease of usage of all these positives urge us to post “Stories” frequently on Instagram or Facebook.
• Temporary is the new cool!— Mostly very short & not-so-much-post-worthy content is uploaded as your “Stories”. For example, content creators use them as teasers for a big upcoming event, or a promotional technique to constantly remind fans to go and watch their posts or videos. Other classic use-cases are about wishing birthdays, anniversaries, small achievements in a very short yet elaborative story that will stay for just 24 hours! Today almost everyone is excited to share their day-to-day activities which aren’t very important, yet there is an internal desire to share them with the world. For example, a rainy day with garam chai, or your favorite football team’s victory, or your subtle political views, or your newly developed culinary skills, or even a re-post of your past adventures as a “throwback” are all activities for which “Stories” act as the ideal and temporary platform to gush about!
• Sky is the limit! — With the option of allowing you to use plenty of imaginative and creative filters, add your favorite song, flaunt the live geo-location of your exotic vacation, “Stories” is truly an exquisite and ethereal feature! Instagram stories have compelling visualization features with unlimited options that actually serve a purpose. A particularly unique and (risky) feature is when brands take a poll to ask you questions about your preferences and inputs about a certain product. This helps them in R&D and design, but I said it’s risky because now Instagram clearly knows what you like and it can do a perfect ‘Target advertisement’ planning to force you to buy things that you will most probably love and buy! This article states that around 75% of Japanese consumers consult social media before buying products like cosmetics and clothes.

Moving to the elephant in the room and de-coding how “Stories” particularly are a threat to us. It is because they either lead towards one or both of the following things — Wasted time and/or Wasted money!

1. Wasted time

• Time is money, and the un-monitored and long hours spent on posting and browsing “stories” is a waste of energy and mental stability in the long run.
• The 24-hour temporary feature drives you towards using (either by personally posting or just viewing what's happening in other people’s accounts) the “Story” feature more frequently. You falsely assume that you would not spend more than 10 minutes of your time on it but cumulatively end up wasting more time than planned, at times even hours.
• A big sign of addiction is that you spend a lot of time overthinking and over-planning your posts. It is not just about that one-minute task of posting or seeing a story, but the whole process of choosing that perfect scene to capture or picture to post, garnishing it with dozens of elements, sorting them, compartmentalizing “stories” on your home page, and finally the incessant need to check statistics such as Likes, Shares, and Comments in order to get an instant gratification rush.
• The same goes while viewing stories back to back. It starts with just clicking on one story, but then the auto-play mode surely doesn’t let you stop and come out of the loop because you are actually enjoying yourself with every byte of (unnecessary) information about your friend’s daily life experiences and your favorite celebrities’ extravagant lifestyle. Now, ideally, that time could have had been very conveniently used to do productive activities such as reading, learning a new musical instrument, or simply watching that inspiring documentary you had shortlisted!

2. Wasted money

• If it leads to an impulse purchase then it is certainly a serious affair.
• The biggest scam of “Stories”: There are Ads which are smartly (invisibly) sandwiched between the actual stories that appear at the top of your home page. Let me explain why I called them invisibly placed. On the face, when you see the “Stories” section at the top, you cannot actually see any brand or company advertisements. It’s only when you click on one story, the auto mode gets activated, and in-between the usual stories, pop up the “Story Ads” and now you have to watch them without any choice!!!
• The involuntary thrusting of information on the user leads to “views” → “likes” → and eventually “purchase”. Now, this is certainly not limited to only “Stories”, as we can visualize the same cycle through Sponsor Ad Posts and Videos that appear on your home screen. The sole difference between “Post/Video Ads” versus “Story Ads” is that the former is voluntary in the sense you know what you are getting into while the latter (Story Ads) just starts automatically without any option to easily skip it and you will always be compelled to watch it because of the content, quality and relevance of that Ad.

How to stop wasting your time and money while using social media platforms?

1. Switch off all the notifications from your “disturbing” apps. You can delete the applications too, and once a week login through the web versions to check messages and posts.
2. If you don’t want someone’s story to appear in the bar at the top of Feed, you can mute their story. At the top of the feed, tap and hold the profile picture of the person whose story you’d like to mute, select Mute, then tap next to Story.
3. 7-day rule — Wait for 7 days before making a purchase, more often you might feel that you don't need the product anymore after 7 days.
4. Just create a “wishlist” to keep track of things you might want to get in the future.
5. Fall back in love with your hobbies, or discover new ones.

The real connectivity happens when you sit face-to-face and talk and not type, laugh, and not share smiley emoticons!!!

While there is something genuinely sweet about capturing special life moments and sharing them with friends and family on Instagram and Facebook, there should be a balance. It’s fun to shop occasionaly, it is okay to brag about your trips once in a while but not to the detriment of sacrificing our own personal well-being and finances.

Take care!

Pradnya Asolkar