Two more reasons that smart wellness businesses shouldn’t put all their marketing eggs in the Facebook basket.
(Here’s our related article: How Social Media Can – And Can’t – Help Wellness Businesses”.)
1) Resistance is futile…we WILL reveal your personal info
Back in January, Facebook quietly announced that it would allow businesses to access home addresses and cellphone numbers of Facebook users. No surprise – an uproar ensued, and they temporarily suspended this feature.
You can count on one thing, though – Facebook will continue to push the envelope when it comes to sharing user information. They will eventually execute that original plan.
Yes, they’ll dress it up with some new user disclosures, but the bottom line is that they are not committed to preserving user privacy. In fact, they are committed to finding ways to breach it.
Why? Are they just Not Nice People? Nope. As we told you here, their business model depends on sharing user information with organizations that’ll pay them for it.
And here’s why you should care.
Imagine your customers seeing this headline splattered all over the web: “Facebook Sells Your Address and Cellphone Number.”
Now imagine customers dropping their Facebook accounts like hot potatoes.
What’s your Plan B for reaching these customers?
2) Facebook – one more source of stress
Turns out that about 12% of the heaviest Facebook users say using the site increases their anxiety levels.
About 65% of all FB users delay replying to friend requests because they already feel like their FB network’s too big. 32% feel guilty when they turn down a friend request (no wonder they delay responding, huh?). And 10% actually dislike getting friend requests.
The conclusion: ever-expanding networks of “not really friends” stress people out – and it gets worse as they add more and more “friends.”
Now, everybody complains about traditional junk mail delivered by the post office, true. But when’s the last time you heard someone say they avoid checking their postal mail every day because they’re so bothered by junk mail? Very, very rare.
Yet that’s exactly how they say they react to Facebook!
My point’s not that you should drop FB in favor of postal mail – but that again, you don’t want to put all your marketing eggs in one basket that sizable numbers of people actively avoid and even dislike.
