In a word? Yes.
Social media use to be a fun way to rediscover old high school classmates and allow distant family members to stay loosely connected to each other's lives without the dreaded family phone call. Your local pizza place looked hip if they had a Facebook page, and when they debuted a new slice? Chances were pretty good that half the local area saw it on Facebook.
Today, no one will ever see your posts. Read that again. Seriously.
Paying for ads or boosting posts is equally useless – but much more of a hassle. Today Facebook's Business Center is as much fun as a day spent formatting Excel spreadsheets. Facebook routinely offers pre-formatted ads that you can easily approve with a single click – only to bounce back a flurry of vaguely threatening policy violations – for the ad Facebook created.
Hacking and fake accounts run rampant. There are so many scams and cons that experts advise having a family "safe word" when the answer is a bit more obvious – close your account.
Every major platform has devolved into turbulent seas of misinformation and disinformation. The comment section for even the mildest of posts gives you a sneak peek of Hell. Public and private groups – no matter how benign – devolve into political cage matches and off-topic rants. Between watching your elder relatives become radicalized, to 500-word ramblings about only the truest friends sharing a post, to clickbait offered by terrorist groups, there are many reasons to leave.
Very few to stay.
META is censoring content, limiting reach, and burying progressive content – and doing away with the anemic fact-checking they once claimed to provide.
What about Discord? What about Telegram? Any number of private chats? Picture living in an asylum for the criminally insane somewhere in Siberia, or – for younger readers – Azkaban. Your morning inbox reveals 56,000 posts you've missed overnight. If you feel weighed down by the last shred of your sanity? These apps might work for you.
The game plan for 2025 is simple: life support only.
If your business or company pages aren't generating a ton of interaction? But you don't want to delete them? Just put your META accounts on hold. Clean up and delete old page content, and only include the most relevant and recent content. Place a single post regarding your hours, how to reach you, and how you communicate with customers – pinned to the top. And only post when something important comes up.
Next, review your actual business needs for advertising and customer outreach based on company size, media options, audience and priority using my Myers Briggs Social Media Strategy and consider returning to old school advertising.
Delete your old Twitter/X account. Close/delete any others you haven't actively used in six months. If you haven't gotten into a platform yet, like TikTok? Don't. (Or at least, wait.)
