My Life without Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg has got a problem.

Well, he’s got more problems those last weeks, but there’s one more that I add to his woes.

With all the crap happening around Facebook and all the time I lose with it, I’m seriously thinking about leaving. What holds me back? What is still keeping me from slamming the door? Not sure he’ll notice me leaving. 😉

In fact, I’m currently trying to evaluate:

• What I use it for?
• What Facebook is doing for me?
• How much does it annoy me?

Those are the three question I’ll try to address in this post.

Let’s start with the first one! What do I use Facebook for?

The easy answer is, I use it to channel more visits to my blog. Period, that’s all! Supposedly….

Seems that’s not a very good and healthy idea, according to this post on C.J. Chilver’s blog!

I have seriously reduced my visits to Facebook those last months. I just have my blogposts reposted to my Facebook page and after publishing stuff I hop over to Facebook to share it to some groups I’m subscribed to. Well, I try to just do that but often I find myself entangled in Facebook’s web and after fifteen or twenty minutes I have to forcefully drag myself away from the crap I read.

The second questions is related: What does Facebook do for me?

Who is not happy with lots of traffic on his site? What blogger does not try to attract ever more readers? I know it’s not about numbers, it’s not about clicks and visits and likes. If that was my goal I’d use Facebook and Instagram and all the other Twitters much more.

What I’m looking for is to have a circle of people I can deliver things of interrest to. If a nice discussion starts after a certain post I’m more than happy. Seeing that people actually read what I write makes me happy. I hope it makes you happy too…

Of course I check the numbers ever so often. But are they really important? Not that much! So let’s just say that the number of visits is important. How much traffic does Facebook generate for my blog? Here the WordPress statistics are a great help.

In 2017 I have totalled 31482 visits on my blog. The ‘Referrers’ section tells me that of those, 1518 persons clicked over from Facebook. That’s about 4,8%.

For 2018, up to now I see about 3,5% of referrals from Facebook. In 2016 I tally 7%. Honestly, I thought it would be more.

So this will not hold me back!

Are there other benefits for me in Facebook? Stuff like keeping in touch with folk… I prefer doing it directly if needeed. Buying and selling (photo-) stuff… There’s eBay!

As for the ‘Followers’ on Facebook… thanks folks, but if you want, follow my blog. As an aside, when hearing of ‘followers’ I have a picture in mind of a bunch of people trudging behind me….

So I guess I don’t really need Facebook…..

Last question: How much does Facebook annoy me?

A LOT!

I recently cleaned up my phone, deleting any apps that steal my time. YouTube is gone now as I got really sucked in some days and binge watched stupid stuff. Instagram is only a distant memory too.

Now I said that I just hop over to Facebook to re-post my stuff to some groups…. but no only. The Facebook app shows me regularly that new stuff has arrived and I just can’t keep from  looking what it is. And then of course I see some nice analog camera for sale, and I click on to other stuff and I lose precious time.

I hate myself for that, but I can’t stop it.

I don’t know how many times I check that darn phone and get sucked in. That’s enough!

Last, let’s not even go into the privacy stuff, the addiction that Facebook represents. As for privacy, it’s of course up to you to tell the worls more or less about your life. I’m amazed about what people post sometimes. But as we all know, Facebook is incredibly busy gathering our data, profiling us and targeting us with ads and other crap.

Definitely not a good thing.

So I think my decision is made. This will probably be the last thing I post on Facebook. Sorry, Mark Z.

As for the nice people who ‘follow’ me there, why not visit http://www.whyfilmcameras.com directly.

Now I heard that leaving Facebook might be difficult. You can deactivate the account but that won’t delete all the data of course. Getting dear Mark to really delete your stuff is much harder as it seems.

I’d be happy to hear your opinions. Can you live without Facebook? Is there life out there? Or do you think I will slink back after some time and resume my Facebook ‘reality’?

Anyways, this is just my opinion and I thank you for reading this!