Why you should consider taking your business entirely away from Facebook

Sounds dramatic....

Here are some interesting things I’ve noticed on Facebook (FB) this year:

• Even less business page engagement than ever before.

• Individuals taking the FB app off their phone so they can be more present.

• Individuals using FB far less than ever before, and posting far less.

• People actually leaving FB altogether.

At the same time, people are using LinkedIn more than ever, and also consuming more media / information via emails and general news websites rather than relying on Facebook for information.

Way more concerning than that though, are 2 things that came across my desk in the last week:

• A client of mine had his entire Facebook account blocked - he had simply posted a photo of his own daughter, which violated the “community guidelines” or something like that. He showed me the photo. It was a just a totally normal photo, of a kid, that was on his personal timeline.

• My own business page got a warning for something similar, and despite trawling through, we couldn’t find anything remotely like a “guideline breach”.

What I do know is that once FB determines that you have broken the rules, you are pretty much deleted - screwed - gone.

Is that a place you want to use for business growth?

If you are one of those people who has placed a lot of faith in Facebook as a place to grow your business, maybe now is the time to pretend like Facebook has a one month outage, and look at where else you can build / grow your business.

You have to ask yourself, is time spent on Facebook really useful? Are you “working” but before you know it you are chatting in a group about lost cats?

Some other things to consider with Facebook:

• Is your data really safe?

• How free are you to say what you want to say within the guidelines of still being a good human?

• Are the leads that DO come to your business, good quality leads?

I’d also point out that when we engage with a new Marketing client, we often see an over reliance on Facebook, at the expense of:

• Building your own Blog which brings Google traffic.

• Working on your own Google Business Profile to help dominate local SEO.

• Basic things like following up old leads.

• Any presence on LinkedIn.

• Email marketing.

• Basic communication like replying to emails, picking up the phone etc.

• Building an audience on places like YouTube or Pinterest - depends on the business that you run though.

This is not an article designed to hate on Facebook.

What I’m simply trying to do is highlight that Facebook CAN be a very unstable place, and hopefully open your eyes a little to other, safer, places to focus on, and hopefully build an audience that you can engage with, when you need to.

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