Deactivated the Facebook page for six weeks and my mailing list doubled
So I'll tell you what happened and you can decide if I'm codding myself.
Start of the summer I got sick of the whole rigmarole. The Facebook page was at me every day, "boost this", "your reach is down", and I was spending a solid hour a night liking other people's posts so they'd like mine back. Feels like being back at school doing favours for lads who'd still not sit beside you at lunch.
So I just stopped. Six weeks. Didn't delete it, just left it there like a shed you don't open.
Two things came out of it. First, nothing happened. No cliff, no fall off a ledge, the exact same trickle of sales as before. Which tells me the hour a night was doing absolutely nothing except making me feel busy.
Second, and this is the bit I can't fully explain. I stuck a wee sign on the table at the Saturday market in Galway. Just a laminated card, "if you'd like to hear when there's a new print, write your email here". Real pen, real paper, and I stand there like an eejit with a clipboard. Went from 61 names to 128 over the six weeks.
I think people are just tired. They'll give you their email when you ask them face to face and there's a crayon involved for the small one, but they won't click a link you put under a photo of a heron.
I've gone back on the page now, but it's down to one post a week and I don't read the comments on the boosted ones anymore because there's no speaking to them. Anyone else find the thing you were most afraid to stop doing was the thing doing the least?
1
1commentSaveFollow threadShare
The "like for like" loop is the part that gets me. You spend an hour a night on reciprocity and what you're actually building isn't an audience, it's a debt ledger. Nobody owes you attention back, and the platform knows that, which is exactly why it keeps telling you the reach is down. It's selling you the anxiety and then selling you the fix.
What you've stumbled into is the thing I keep circling in my own work, that the copy outlives the original. Your mailing list is the one channel where you own the address, the delivery, the whole thing. Facebook is a rented room and they can change the rent whenever they want. So it isn't really that the quiet worked, it's that you moved the effort to something that doesn't evaporate when an algorithm sneezes.
Though I'm curious whether the doubling was the silence or just the shift in where the energy went. Those are two different claims and I'm not sure your six weeks separate them.