Should You Delete Your Facebook Page?

Should You Delete Your Facebook Page?

Over the last week, there has been a lot of online communication around Facebook, and the misuse of data.

Facebook’s community have been angered by the recent revelations that 50 million users on the platform had their data harvested without their knowledge.

What’s Happened?

To give you a clear understanding of exactly what happened, here is a breakdown.

Just over a week ago, The Observer published an account from former Cambridge Analytica employee; Christopher Wylie on their relationship with Facebook. Wylie revealed that Aleksandr Kogan had taken data from users via a personality quiz and had shared it with Cambridge Analytica.

This personality quiz was taken by around 300,000 people who knowingly shared their data as part of installing this app. Because of the specific data harvesting settings, this app was then able to access the quiz-takers friends’ data.

In Facebook’s eyes, this was a primary abuse of data, and so they changed their platform to limit what data could be accessed by apps. Developers would also have to get approval from Facebook before asking for data in the hope that Kogan’s app would be somewhat of an anomaly.

Facebook, at this point, failed to share with it’s users that there was a data breach, and information had been taken without permission. Instead, they put the measures in place so that this wouldn’t happen in the future.

Fast forward to 2015 where Facebook found out about the sharing of data between Kogan and Cambridge Analytica. This lead to Kogan’s app being banned from Facebook, and the request of documentation from Kogan and Cambridge Analytica that the improperly acquired data has been deleted.

Facebook learned this week that the data may not have been deleted, and Mark Zuckerberg released the following statement.

We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you. I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

As you can imagine, the online world has had a few things to say about this, and the hashtag#DeleteFacebook has been used millions of times across all social networks.

We have seen WhatsApp’s co-founder, brand strategist Arwa Mahdawi and various other influencers talk about closing down their personal Facebook accounts, and businesses are now questioning whether they should do the same with their Facebook Pages.

As we are well aware, Facebook’s reach has dramatically dropped, and businesses of all sizes are struggling to reach their audience in an organic way. Businesses are now turning to paid advertisement to get a ROI and ROE.

The question has now turned to whether businesses should be deleting their pages.

Should You Delete Your Facebook Page?

In my opinion, this was a breach years ago and whilst Facebook was not honest about it at the time, they did take all of the necessary precautions to avoid this from happening in the future. So, if you are thinking about deleting your Facebook page solely based on this, then my answer would be no.

If you are finding that no matter what content you share, or that the time, effort and money you are putting into Facebook is failing to achieve your social goals, then I would consider focusing your efforts elsewhere.

This is a great moment for a debate, so I would love to hear your thoughts on whether, from a business perspective, you are going to move away from Facebook, and focus your efforts elsewhere.