Leaving Facebook is hard…
It’s been 23 days since I submitted my requests to Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. I just have to hold out and not log on for one more week and they’ll delete my profiles.
But do I want to drop Facebook, Instagram, etc?
Next year, when I’m done with the “fundamentals phase” of this project to become an animator and composer, I’ll enter the practice and refine phase, where I’ll start sharing my progress with more demos and output. But how will I drive traffic?
Every artist these days needs a Social Media Pipeline as part of their production pipeline. While I’ll still have other avenues, it feels like sacrificing my Facebook and Instagram profiles is going to be costly. I lose contact with dozens of friends, can’t build an artist page to drive more followers, and FB promoted posts are a cheap way to drive clicks. I drove over 1,000 free downloads of my novel for less than 20 cents per download using a promoted post.
Righteous indignation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be
While I’m sick of the horrible moderation at Facebook that seems to penalize real people for bogus reasons while letting scam advertisers and bots overrun the site, it feels a bit like when I tried to quit UPS. The work to find vendors who would ship to me via other carriers and keep UPS off my property was a LOT of work for minimal benefit.
Am I causing myself WAAAY more trouble and effort to avoid them than it’s worth? Am I losing an important marketing channel? I know the criticisms that the more popular you get, the harder it gets to engage with your followers there, BUT for getting a snowball rolling on a shoestring, it can be useful.
Can I, do I, will I start from near zero?
I’m still trying to decide and I have a little under a week to do so. It’s going to be difficult. On the one hand, it’s been a source of frustration, but is that frustration more or less than the stress of trying to build my other channels to that level and beyond?
If you’re an artist who uses Facebook as a marketing channel, could you or would you want to dump it altogether or just figure out how much of your time it was worth?
I cracked. I decided that until at least when I start releasing content, the platform and audience I have at FB, however small, is necessary to help me get the ball rolling. I’m trying to significantly limit my use, but I cancelled my deletion.