That seems like a silly question when Facebook is the happening social network these days. The stats are familiar to many of us: Facebook has more than 400 million active users, half of whom log on to their page on any given day. The average user has 130 friends and people spend more than 8.3 billion hours per month on Facebook. So gosh, why would anyone want to leave there?
Dan Yoder of Rocket.ly blog has lots of reasons, and he’s bundled most of them into his “Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Quit Facebook.”
Yoder’s main reason is because Facebook not only doesn’t respect its members privacy, it actively shares their information with advertisers and apparently anyone else it deems appropriate. Indeed, the whole concept of “privacy” seems to be foreign to the social network’s creators.
That would be enough to close your account, which, Yoder notes, is more difficult than you might think — so he provides a link to the semi-secret page where you can send your Facebook page into oblivion.
Another reason that Yoder touched on but which is much more annoying is how plain stupid Facebook is if you are a business user trying to set up a brand page. My company had to give up and kill our page and start another because somehow my online DNA became inextricably mixed into our corporate brand page when I set it up. We could never fix it, and Facebook’s favorite problem-solving approach is to cancel the site and start over. It’s like a help FAQ where the most frequent solution is to deactivate your page.
In talking with friends who are experiencing similar problems with a business-oriented site, we have come to conclusion that Zuckerburg and the kids at Facebook are still stuck in their dorm and haven’t really started thinking like adults yet, which is why brand pages are just kind of ineffectual personal pages with some different elements grafted on with crazy glue. It’s like their engineers are really good at making a socnet for college kids, but are completely at a loss for what the world of business needs from a social network.
Of course, they could ask for help from experienced IT people, but that would mean trusting someone over 30.
I’m not sure whether I’ll take Yoder’s advice and permanently close my personal page. Part of me wants to say shove it, Facebook, but then part of me is kind of mildly hooked on the networking parts of it.
In any event, I’m staying as far away from that new Like button as I can.