Another day, another marketing type person having a grand, farewell tour on Facebook. You know the drill, they tell everyone they are done with Facebook because and they just feel it’s time that they moved on.
I have a weak gag reflex so these things disgust me.
Lately, there have been quite a few of these people “leaving” Facebook because they object to “privacy” abuses. I kid you not, some of these people are the biggest spammers I’ve ever come across.
Literally, there was one guy the other day who announced he was deleting Facebook from his phone who a few years back was selling Facebook ID scraping tools – yeah, he was THE problem and now he’s objecting to it. I think his departure has more to do with the fact that Facebook is closing down most API loopholes now, but I’m a cynic.
The one I saw today was a “C” or “D” list marketing type person who built her tiny audience and “business” in the last year or so almost exclusively on referrals from people that she got from being BFFs with other slightly more prominent marketing types on Facebook.
This lady told us all that she’s not leaving because of privacy but because Facebook is such a black hole of time for her and it’s causing her to lose sight of her mission and distracting her from helping her clients (which she got exclusively through Facebook) achieve their ambitions.
She shared her email address and encouraged everyone to follow her instead on Twitter – LOL.
I might just address that one, quickly.
I like Twitter – you can follow me if you want, my address is @skaye and I’ve been on Twitter for over a decade. Mostly though, I find Twitter useless for anything beyond following a few hockey journalists.
It’s a broadcast medium, the conversations are superficial at best.
And I have a hunch that’s why this woman has decided to shift to Twitter. She’s also said she’s going to communicate more externally via her email list which indicates a desire to annunciate rather than communicate.
I spend time in the Casual Marketer Facebook Group every day leaving comments and reading what people have to say – it has the genesis of a nice little community.
But it takes work.
Many of the people who are pulling out of Facebook should leave – they have lost the understanding that it is a communication platform. It’s not just some random marketing channel where you can blast out promotional nonsense to a bunch of people. You need to foster relationships and participate for it to produce benefits for you from a business perspective.
Putting all that aside though, I just genuinely hate the whole, “I’m leaving, it’s what I have to do for me, blah blah blah” crap.
Seriously, just go. None of us will miss you. Buh Bye.
The only reason you’re broadcasting your departure is that you WANT something on the way out the door! You either want people to plead with you to stay, you want them to tell you how sorely you’ll be missed, you want to funnel them into another channel that suits your selfish ends better or some kind of combination of all three.
Pretty much, nobody cares if you leave. This woman, she literally will not be missed by anyone in a Facebook context. The odd referral I’ve seen where someone mentions her to a potential client will just go to someone else.
So if you decide to delete Facebook’s app from your phone or delete your entire profile, seriously, none of us cares.
Show some class and let yourself out quietly.