Why I deactivated my Facebook account
Image by MoneyBlogNewz on Flickr
Earlier this year, I did something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: I deactivated my Facebook account. My motivation wasn’t anything dramatic; it was more of an experiment to see if I would miss Facebook — or wonder why I hadn’t deactivated it sooner.
To be clear, “deactivating” a Facebook account doesn’t equate to permanently deleting it. When your account is deactivated you are, in effect, invisible. While you retain your Facebook friends, they can’t post on your page, tag you in posts or photos, message you or even see you. You also don’t appear in search results, and you can’t receive friend requests. Activating your account — and allowing for all the previously mentioned activity to again be possible — is simply a matter of logging in using your Facebook credentials. In short, it’s not a very drastic change.
The same can be said for the overall outcome of deactivating my account. It’s felt less like a sea change and more like a ripple across the water. And in truth, there are a number of things I miss. First, I miss the window Facebook gives us into our friends’ lives. I’ve often said that one of the greatest attributes of social media is that it removes much of the labor that comes with staying in touch, and I definitely feel a little less connected to some of the people in my life. In addition, I sometimes miss the ease of sharing at a moment’s notice — and, of course, the little endorphin rush that comes when someone likes or comments on those posts.
Those benefits notwithstanding, however, I don’t have any plans to permanently reactivate my account any time soon. My experience so far has been that there are greater benefits associated with not being on Facebook, both personally and professionally. Two that stand out are:
More productive use of my time. While my job includes social media strategy on behalf of my clients, most of the time I had spent on Facebook was unrelated to work. To be clear, I’m a huge believer in downtime — spending time on Facebook, after all is no worse than watching TV or playing video games — but I often felt like Facebook was taking up too much time. Getting that time back has allowed me to focus on things more important to me. Chief among those is helping more people use social media to grow their businesses instead of using it personally for negligible amounts of pleasure. To that point…
Less pointless dissatisfaction and anger. I recently participated in a news story about “social media sickness,” a modern-day phenomenon that occurs when spending time on sites like Facebook leads us to compare our everyday lives with our friends’ “highlight reels” (in the form of vacation photos, achievements, or newly-purchased possessions). Although I was interviewed relative to my work, I realized I had a personal connection to the topic, too, since I sometimes exhibited the symptoms I was explaining. In addition, I had long grown tired of the political debates (and resultant name calling) that can make Facebook friends less than...well, friendly. Was I guilty of sometimes being part of those conversations? Yes. Did I have to continue to be part of it, or even subject myself to it? Nope.
To be clear, I’m not encouraging anyone else to deactivate Facebook. In addition, I can’t guarantee that I won’t reactivate my account someday (maybe even by the time this is published). However, too often I hear busy professionals talk about not having time for their goals while appearing to have time to log onto Facebook multiple times a day, or I watch relationships crumble because of something said — or unsaid — in the news feed, or I listen to people talk about how much they hate Facebook, often while logged on to Facebook. When that happens, it reminds me that Facebook — in our personal lives and for our businesses — is wholly optional. I can assure you your business won’t crumble and you won’t become a pariah if you log off.
So if you feel improved instead of diminished by being on Facebook, good for you. But if you’ve often wondered whether you’d be better off without it, maybe a hiatus is in order. It may not change your life, but it could be the first step towards getting back the time you need to make the most of it.
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