A few days ago a friend of mine posted a message on Facebook. The gist of it was that he had ‘tested’ living without Facebook for 2 weeks or so, and actually quite liked it. His life didn’t end, his girlfriend didn’t leave him and he was not desperate to find out what his friends were up to. So he decided to delete his Facebook profile. The reason being that he only really used it when he was bored to death. Only to find it has become a marketing brochure for what all your friends like.
Click here to find out!
These are all valid reasons. But the main reason, he said, was what we like to call clickbait. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw this. I was shocked! Click here to find out!’. You know you’ve seen them. And you know you have clicked on at least one message to see if it was really that shocking. It wasn’t.
Everyone likes traffic to their websites. Normal humans and businesses want traffic that matters. Traffic from visitors that truly genuinely enjoy reading the website content. And then there are the ‘viral’ websites which only seem to care about driving as much traffic to any of their posts as they can. Quantity instead of quality.
I was trying to prove to my friend he was exaggerating. I even accused him of starting a ‘I’m too cool for Facebook’ trend. But it’s true, he has a point.
Our Experiment
I just did a very scientific experiment and went through the first 25 posts on my FB wall. This is the result.
5x posts of ‘my friend liked this’ or ‘commented on this’
5x sponsored posts
3x clickbait posts
8x posts of pages that I’ve liked (although mainly for link backs to their website)
4x post by one of my friends
So out of 25 posts, only 4 have been posts by one of my friends. To be fair, 8 posts were from pages that I liked but even those wanted me to check out what they had to say on their website.
Is my friend exaggerating? Yes, I think he is. But he does have a point. If Facebook continues to give priority to advertising, commercial messages and clickbait, then people will be looking to find their social stuff elsewhere.
If you are not older than 14 for example, chances are you will be spending most of your time on Snapchat instead of Facebook – as the below video by Casey Neistat explains. Video from Casey Neistat’s YouTube page.
Up your game Facebook, or you’ll become the place where only Dinosaurs hang out.