Is it Time to Deactivate your Facebook?

How many of us have totally freaked out when we were in the middle of an intense Facebook update and suddenly your phone dies. It’s scary isn’t it? You suddenly feel lost, disconnected, and so far away from friends and family and all of your intergalactic social family.

What do you do now? #OMG I can’t make a status update about how my phone has just died and how this is all just so #firstworldproblems.  Maybe you should use a payphone? What’s a payphone you ask? Oh, it was that thing we used to use before we all had smartphones, Facebook, Twitter, and any other form of communication.  Just joking, but seriously where would we all be without social media? Disconnected.

We’re all addicted to social media whether we like to admit it or not. In particular we are obsessed with Facebook because it connects us to friends and it helps us reconnect with old friends and relatives in faraway places. It’s completely understandable that we have become attached to Facebook because it has given us a way to connect like nothing else has, but has it distracted us from the real world, made us negative, self conscious, and jealous?

110% it has. A recent Mashable article called “Reasons to deactivate Facebook” has given us all the reasons why we should be hitting the “deactivate” button and checking- out instead of checking-in to the Facebook world.

1. Unconscious Addiction: We all don’t realize it but Facebook is habit forming. Think about how many times you have waken up in the middle of the night to check your Facebook notification, or how many likes you’ve received on a picture, but unlike actually being addicted to smoking or drugs it’s harder to notice the backlash from a Facebook addiction. On average, women spend about 81 minutes per day while men spend 84 minutes.

2. Low Self-Esteem: A study shows that Facebook users (especially females) feel more body conscious by looking at friends’ online photos.

3. The Job Hunt: Through studies it has been shown that 90% of job recruiters will use a candidate’s profile as part of their screening process, the same studies have shown that 69% of those recruiters have rejected a candidate based on the content they saw. So, if you’re going to use Facebook clean it up folks and be professional.

4. Applying to Colleges: Like applying to jobs the same thing goes for applying to colleges. Every college wants a respectful and responsible student.

5. Breakups: Going through a breakup? Can you do us all a favor and get off Facebook. No one wants to read your “I don’t need a man/woman” and “I was too good for him/her” spiel every time they log in. Clearly you’re not over it, but you don’t need to burden other people with your problems, truth is people don’t care.

6. Facebook Envy: No surprise here, but Facebook breeds’ jealousy, a new study shows. Most people use the social network to post celebratory moments — forget the bad stuff. Reading a continuous stream of other people’s happy moments can almost directly correlate to feeling negative about yourself, as well as comparing your accomplishments to others.

7. Exam Time: Deactivating your account during test time makes it that much harder to refresh your news feed, aka slack and lose focus – since it will seem like the majority of the world is out enjoying themselves (even though they’re probably procrastinating, too).

8. Privacy: Features like graph search render all your likes and dislikes   available to anyone. Marketers have access to significant details of your life, as well, which should make you at least slightly uncomfortable.

Even though I find all these reasons to deactivate your Facebook account plausible we cannot deny that Facebook has done something great for everyone. It has connected us all and has brought us closer to our audience. Isn’t that what every marketer wants?

Patricia Ferreira, Raven5 Ltd, Oakville, Ontario March 2014.

 

---

View All