Many are now avoiding social media. How much of a hindrance is this to business growth to be "unavailable" in these channels?
Hey peeps, just a bit of a brain dump/gathering opinions. Apologies if this is a frequent topic.
Whether it is for privacy/ethical concerns, better use of attention or any other reason, I've seen a growing anti-social media sentiment. The only forms of social media left for me are Twitter, and Reddit+HackerNews if you count them as such. My main use for Twitter is following some dev circles and having a way to reach customer support of companies when their traditional channels fail (which is often).
So what I'm wondering is how much it'd hurt to not have these "traditional" channels?
If that's where your customers are there's not much of a choice. In cases where you need a normal account to run a business page, the compromise can be to just make a bare bones account and give as little data as possible to run it. Here you can leverage browser profiles, Firefox Containers, VPN, etc. if you want to go that far as well.
Of course, instead of worrying about this you can just not think about all the above and just avoid it or have one, but how do you think it affects your projects if you do avoid it?
You can grow a business without being on social media. Thousands of people do it every day.
The question should be: am I willing to be on Facebook to potentially make more money?
The word "potentially" should be stressed. People present social media as no brainer, but in many instances is useless or a waste of resources.
This is even more true if you are a solo indiehacker, as your time is your most precious asset and software based product generally don't perform well on social media.
Thanks for the insight. Fair point on software products!
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My customers are most likely on Facebook, like everyone else's.
But, although I'm not against Big Tech per se (I'm in the Google ecosystem after all), Facebook is a deal breaker, where I draw the line. I don't want to use it, not even with a minimal account. Twitter is the only social platform I'm on.
This hurts as I'm mostly invisible. The major issue is these days people no longer click anything, they don't look beyond their social feed where they're mostly passive.
Good points raised. I've abandoned FB products (moving to Signal right now too) and definitely don't want to make my entire funnel reliant on these channels. Google I'm also not keen to always play the game on, so for some services I minimise involvement. However Google is a much tougher one to avoid, hence my focus more on the big social media companies.
I haven't heard anyone mention lack of engagement on social posts (at least to external sites) but perhaps that is becoming more common too. I honestly don't blame an ordinary user for being numbed to the constant barrage and thus not engaging with much at all. That being said, is it better to just exist on these platforms to sort of validate your product/company being legitimate or just forgo it altogether?
Tough question. I'm choosing to stay on Twitter. Necessity is the mother of invention, maybe I'll come up with viable alternate channels. And I have a Revue newsletter, which may get more discoverability after Twitter's acquisition.
No special insight, but thanks for asking. I had the same question.
folks have been very successful without it. it really is up to you.
... you should do what you like. spend time in those types of areas and you can start building a following, audience, and community from there.
I kind of suspect that the early users for what I'm building almost certainly won't come from Facebook. At the same time, I'm pretty sure that eventually I'll need to incorporate Facebook into my growth strategy sooner rather than later.
You've pretty much already outlined my strategy. Just maintain enough and just enough of a presence to run the marketing game, but otherwise not actively use Facebook. It certainly seems like they're all powerful, but on an individual level if you care enough you can slip through their radar pretty easily without much in the way of sacrifice.
I must admit though that for me the main problem is the addiction loop they've crafted into the platform. That problem was easy enough to solve. I unfollowed nearly every friend (I'll manually check in to see how they're doing) and unliked nearly every page save for those belonging to a friend's business. You're still stuck in old habits for a while, but pretty soon even habit picks up on the fact that the place has been hollowed out and there's no point in returning, save of course for for the marketing page.
I think it´s easy to integrate the classic social media channels in your marketing. There are so many tools for it that it's a no brainer for me to leverage them. Most of my clients choose to use it, so I guess they'll accept my online presence there as well.
That being said, I post on all of them but my main focus is Linkedin. That's where I feel I can make the most genuine connection.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago