Why I’m Closing My Facebook Page
Posted 21st April 2014
Category: Chit-Chat Genres: N/A
15 Comments
After much time spent considering, I’m closing my blog’s Facebook page. Admittedly I don’t spend much time on Facebook. I prefer the real-time interaction Twitter provides and even though I often forget to visit Pinterest, I prefer the reason d’etre of the visual network.
However my reasons for finishing with Facebook aren’t about preference. There are three reasons. The first is that I’m getting bored of being locked out of my account due to ‘suspicious activity’. Perhaps if I had thousands of likes on Facebook I would understand this, but I have a grand total of 23. I rather suspect that what is truly happening is that Facebook has taken issue with the changing nature of IP addresses and decided it means that various people are trying to sign in when really it’s me every time. After a couple of ‘confirm who you are’ attempts that worked, I now have to ‘explain what I was doing when it happened’. After doing this once and finding myself having to repeat just a couple of weeks on, I see it as time wasted. I could be having a conversation about books on Twitter instead.
I expect that the 23 followers I have on Facebook likely subscribe to the blog, or follow me on Twitter and so on. And this leads me to my second reason for opting out – since Facebook changed their foremost consideration to paid advertising, very few followers of any Facebook pages whose editor isn’t spending money are seeing any updates. Reports vary but the numbers of followers seeing updates are very low across the board, as low as 1%. This means that if you’ve a few thousand followers, perhaps a few dozen are seeing your updates. If you’d bought followers, then obviously, like Twitter’s purge of spammers, it’s not such a bad thing. But it’s surely not right when a person who decided to follow your page sees no updates from that page.
My third reason is that whilst I understand Twitter and Pinterest, I’ve never really known how to make Facebook different other than to spread posting across all three social media accounts and thus seem to be online only sporadically. My Facebook posts inevitably end up being similar or the same as my tweets, and though I could always work on my knowledge of Facebook, this reason is simply just another reason – the other two reasons already made the decision for me.
So from now on I’m concentrating exclusively on Twitter and Pinterest. I may use time saved from Facebook to work on my Booklikes account or I might just spend more time on Twitter.
Have you thought of giving up a social network/have you actually given one up?
April 21, 2014, 3:34 am
I’m considering it too. It’s too much of a hassle, and I’m just not a big enough of a blogger to really get people commenting or talking on there. Plus, I forget about it for days, weeks at time. Facebook is certainly making it harder and harder for people to have pages on there.
April 21, 2014, 3:44 am
Yeah, I never feel sure why I’ve kept the blog’s facebook page. I auto-post everything to it, but I hardly interact with it otherwise. Twitter’s just a more fun use of time and energy.
April 21, 2014, 11:40 am
I used to have facebook. I only set up when I was at uni as a way to keep in touch with friends, events and collaborative work. Once back home I hardly ever went on there and the site used to send me messages informing me I hadn’t visited in a while which annoyed me so I deleted it.
April 21, 2014, 1:53 pm
I love Facebook but never had a page for my blog on it. I post a link there when I post on the blog so my friends can read it. What I like on FB is the conversation.
Twitter is the one I’ve mostly given up. I will respond if my email tells me someone is talking to me on Twitter, and I post a link over there when I post on the blog, but I never really got the shouting into the void aspect of it.
April 21, 2014, 3:45 pm
I never tried to get my blog going on Facebook, so I use Facebook for personal, family, and work contacts, not for blogging or for following my favorite bloggers. I try to use Twitter for the blog, but it’s time-consuming to have a lot of Twitter interaction, so I always feel I’m behind on what I could/should be doing. Good choice! I have gotten annoyed by Facebook, too, and as a free service, it definitely doesn’t offer as much as it used to for groups and organizations trying to get news out to their members. You made the right decision!
April 21, 2014, 6:53 pm
Like a few others have said, I have never tried to create a page on Facebook for my blog. I use Facebook mostly to keep in touch with friends and family–I don’t even post links to my blog on Facebook.
Twitter I use for both personal and blog related stuff, but not like I used to.
I tried Tumblr, but never really got the hang of it. Same with Instagram.
April 21, 2014, 7:25 pm
I do have a Facebook page for my blog but I keep forgetting about it and very rarely look at it. My blog posts are automatically posted to the page, so I’ll probably just leave it in case there are people who find it useful, but it does seem a bit pointless as I never interact with anybody there. I’m not a big fan of Twitter either, but I prefer it to Facebook!
April 22, 2014, 8:44 am
Freakishly, this post was directly followed (on my feed reader) by a post saying why a blog should have a Facebook page.
Personally I hate Facebook and if it wasn’t a means to be contacted and keep up with far away friends I would delete the whole thing.
April 22, 2014, 5:08 pm
I’m a FB addict myself, so having a page their for my blog ‘costs me nothing’, so to speak — but I get virtually no traffic. Most of my traffic comes from Twitter or, weirdly enough, GoodReads! I’ve actually been pretty ambivalent about Pinterest lately, and I’ve virtually given up my Tumblr. Social media can be tiring and sometimes gives back so little/nothing!
April 22, 2014, 7:56 pm
I get that, I used to have a page but as FB changed those who liked it did not see the posts. So I just have a Blodeuedd account and my real account. But…kind of pointless
April 22, 2014, 9:26 pm
How ironic! Yesterday when you posted this, I posted about why you SHOULD be on Facebook!
April 23, 2014, 3:39 pm
I don’t mind slow paced when its well done, when the author takes the opportunity to explore things. It’s when a book is slow paced because the author doesn’t have anything to say or is merely filling pages that I become bored.
April 23, 2014, 4:05 pm
Whoops! Sorry, I’ve just realised I’ve commented in the wrong place – thats what you get when you can’t be bothered to get up and put your glasses on. My comment is of course in regard to your review of In Her Shadow
April 24, 2014, 11:43 am
OK, I follow you on TW so no problem. I also have your blog on my reader, so less problem even ;)
You are right about FB: nobody really understands why you can’t see all the posts of all the pages you follow, so well, it’s kind of a lottery.
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April 21, 2014, 1:36 am
I think I started one and closed it up in the same month – for all the reasons you mentioned. I’ve seen it done well, but it does take a lot of time, and is essentially like a 2nd blog – one that takes a lot of time and effort.