Lionel Messi Just Broke the Instagram Record for 'Likes.' Mark Zuckerberg's Reaction Was Eye Opening

Argentina won the World Cup with Lionel Messi leading the way. Do you know what other things he did?

The record for most likes was broken by him.

A series of pictures of Messi and his team holding the trophy were liked more than 70 million times.

I got into the World Cup because I watched Messi and Argentina. Perhaps you did as well.

What's important for our purposes today is how the news of Messi's record was revealed and how useful it is for your business.

The first thing we'll do is look at the news source. Mark wrote on his Facebook account that it came to him.

Leo Messi's World Cup post is now the most liked in Instagram history. WhatsApp also reached a record 25 million messages per second during the final.

A similar cross-post had only 9.8 million likes, and which a lot of people don't even care about.

The big business lesson jumped out at me because of that small detail.

This is how I want it to be. They became well-known around the world at the same time, because they were both three years younger than Messi.

• In 2004, the year when Messi was making his debut for Barcelona, Zuckerberg was programming the first version of Facebook -- the product without which Meta wouldn't exist today.
• In 2012, when Messi was doing things like becoming the leading goal scorer in Barcelona's history, Zuckerberg and Facebook were buying Instagram, for $1 billion in cash and stock.
• And two years later, when Messi and Argentina lost in that year's World Cup final to Germany, Zuckerberg and Facebook were buying yet another next big thing: WhatsApp, for $19 billion.

When he's sharing the news of these big records, what products does he mention? There are two acquisitions from a decade ago that are more important than Facebook.

This has to do with you and your business. Smaller businesses stay small because their leaders don't think about acquisitions as a growth strategy, after writing about entrepreneurship for more than a decade.

That is the path to growth that many large businesses successfully tackle.

They do not attempt to build everything in-house. They build enough of a platform to be able to acquire other ventures and often pivot to the point where the things they acquired mattered more than what they built to begin with.

It's not for every business. Sometimes you're more than happy to be the smaller business getting acquired and moved to the larger one.

It's possible to achieve success and not be remembered.

Messi won the biggest prize in team sports and will be remembered by history.

Will your business be remembered for what it built or what it acquired and developed?

Do you really care?