This online marketer is quitting Facebook

“What do we think about leaving Facebook?”

Kaïa, my social media manager, and I had been thinking about whether or not to continue maintaining the Facebook page for Upswept Creative for a few months. Facebook was never a superstar performer for my little agency, and with Meta continuing its descent into MAGA-enabling policies, we had even more reason to drop it from the roster.

We do have about 1,000 followers on that page, however, so we’d like to take at least some of those folks with us. That meant we needed an exit plan.

Take your time leaving a social media platform.

It would feel really cathartic to just yell, “I quit!” and hit the Delete button on your business page… but, if we don’t want to leave our following in the dark, we should give ourselves some runway for our departure.

The fact is, even if you’ve shared that you’re leaving, the algorithm isn’t necessarily going to show that one, lonely post to all–or even most–of your followers. So, leave yourself a few weeks to spread the word.

Plan multiple social media posts, and schedule over time.

For our Facebook exit, we’ve drafted up a batch of several posts that we’re sharing over time, letting as many people as possible know that they should follow us elsewhere–and including a CTA with links to follow us through any of our other channels.

We’re not even saying anything wildly different from one post to the next. We are, however, making sure that we vary our formats a bit–we’ve included at least one Reel, video Post, and Post carousel in the rotation. 

Then, all we have to do is hop into our social media scheduling tool of choice (in our case, Metricool), batch-schedule that content to go out automatically, so we can wash our hands of the whole affair. 

Update those profile links!

Whenever possible, we like to make it dead-simple for our audience to follow through on a call-to-action. That means updating our profile page with the most current links to find us: our website, our newsletter, and the other social platforms we’ll continue to use.

We’ll also want to make use of whatever other functionalities might show up in folks’ feeds. There are usually multiple spaces on a given social media platform where you can do that.

I put a notice that we’re quitting Facebook in our Intro:

We also:

• updated our header image with an image mentioning that we’re leaving
• verified that our contact info and social links were up-to-date
• changed our Action Button to point towards our email subscribe form
• created a set of Featured Stories on our Facebook profile with our most up-to-date posts pointing to our website, our Website Planner, and this very newsletter.

We might also make liberal use of the @followers function, which would send a notification to our Facebook followers about a given post.

Now, I just need to decide what we’ll do with the page once we’ve officially stopped using Facebook–a conversation that warrants its own newsletter! But, we’ll keep an eye on the metrics, and see where we land once we’ve completed our exit.