Wasting One’s Breath on Facebook Likes

Ah, Facebook, my old friend… I’ve had little to say on the subject of late and there’s not much to add. I’m only on the site in brief fits these days. The last time was made even worse by a cacophony of auto-play videos. Auto-play anything is a sure way to make me hit the back button on any site. Simply scrolling through my news feed should not kick-start videos…

But I digress…

One of the reason I was writing this post was to explain to a multitude of friends why I don’t like the pages they suggest that I should like anymore.

It’s pretty simple, I won’t see what they are sharing anyway. Not unless they intend to pay to be in my feed.

In my mind it should be a two way street. I provide information about myself by “liking” pages. Facebook gets all sorts of marketing data out of that act. Make no mistake that was the overriding reason for Facebook likes to begin with.

But it’s not a two way street. Facebook gathers data but pretty much is guaranteed to hide the posts of the pages I’ve liked. So, to me it’s a pointless gifting of marketing data to a company that hasn’t earned that gift.

The other reason was for this post was more observational than anything. I’ve been using some of my spare time of late to give twitter a more earnest try. I still struggle with the 140 character limit but at least the only filter on what I see is how far I’m willing to scroll.

Yet I’m amazed by the frequency that I follow someone and get a canned direct message from them to come like them on Facebook. Really?

Even if my feelings on Facebook weren’t soured, I’d be bothered by someone I’ve basically just met begging me to come follow them on yet another network. I’ve already followed you. Isn’t that enough?

I get wanting people to follow you in as many venues as possible, but my personal take is that sending a direct message (especially one that’s clearly canned) with that request the moment I’ve followed you is kind of tacky.

Granted, I don’t like the direct messaging system in general and would happily disable it if I could, but if I were going to use it as these folks are, I would at least just direct someone to my website. It could be a message like “thanks for following me – hope you’ll check out my site www.blahblah.com for more about me!” I bet you have those other social network buttons there, too, right? You get site traffic and if they have an interest in following you on another network they will – big win, eh? Granted it still sounds fairly canned which to me is still a turn-off but at least you aren’t begging for Facebook likes.