I’ve never been a big fan of Facebook or social media in general. A silly stance to take, I suppose, being an author; I mean, isn’t that the way to gain supporters/readers/fans? By connecting on social media?
The thought has been plaguing me for some time now – should I delete my Facebook account? To be honest, I’m not that active on Facebook, so I guess it doesn’t really make a difference, one way or the other.
I wondered more about my Author Page than my personal page. In January 2018, Facebook made changes that radically affect Brand pages. For example:
- ‘Human’ pages are prioritised over Brand pages, and that includes Author Pages. Even if you share posts from your Author page, less people are going to see it
- Comments, especially long comments, will carry more weight than ‘likes’
As Thomas Umstattd says in that article, building your marketing strategy on Facebook’s shifting sands is a risky business as you don’t know what changes are coming next.
In light of that, I’ve decided to delete my Author page.
There’s a big part of me that just wants to delete my Facebook account, especially with what’s in the news at the moment concerning Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.
I find it disturbing that ‘an unaccountable private corporation is holding detailed data on over a quarter of the world’s population’. That same corporation, like most tech companies, seems unable to answer simple ‘yes or no’ questions. A good example was when Facebook, along with Twitter and Google, had to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee about social media influence during the 2016 American elections; none of their counsel could give a straight answer.
In this eye-opening, for me anyway, article by Arwa Mahdawi, a writer and brand strategist, ‘the moment you start thinking about Facebook as a surveillance system rather than a social network, it becomes a lot more difficult to hand it your information’. When she visited Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto in 2014, while working in advertising, the sales executives explained ‘how much data Facebook had on its users, all the ways it could target them to click on ads’, and she found it pretty scary.
My dislike of Facebook was underlined when I read this – ‘people with Facebook profiles aren’t the company’s customers: they are the product it sells to advertisers’ - Ellie Mae O'Hagan.
Having re-read what I’ve written, I guess it won’t be long before I will be deleting my Facebook account.
As for my Author Page, I’ll leave it up for another week and delete it next Tuesday, 27 March 2018.