I HATE FACEBOOK!!!

Years ago, I signed up to Facebook, purely to keep with the trend and after a while just to keep in touch with a few friends and family and play Words With Friends.

I used to scorn people that spent any amount of “unproductive” time there.

That was until a few months back, at which point I had amassed a friends list of 300 to 400 over 8 years.

My online business concerns were doing pretty well and I had started to look into creating more content for a few of my brood of websites I have created, so I decided to have a sift on Facebook for some relevant groups.

I added myself to a handful of groups and gathered some pointers here and there.

Being one for testing and scrutinising, I decided I would trial logging in daily, just for 20-30 minutes, do a couple of posts, read and react to a few of other peoples (if I felt compelled to) and puck up a few of the FB friend recommends… Just 5-10 a day. I set myself a 2 week test period, in which I would check footfall and reaction to my submissions and if any of it filtered back to any if my websites.

We are now 8 weeks on…..go and check how many friends I have…..www.Facebook.com/dominusowenmarkham

Well at the time of writing it was 3200!!! The thing you need to understand is that I only added friends at the 5-10 a day for about a week, so my proactive “recruiting” will only account for 100 of these as best.

What else can I tell you, out of this amount of friends, I “know” and regularly interact with probably 10% of those that are new to my following. I have found some close friends, people who are like minded in many things, learnt oodles about lots of different things in addition to resources that I initially set out to find. Also website traffic tracked back to Facebook is daily and a good level.

So, the reason “I hate Facebook” is because it proved me wrong, where I scorned others for wasting their valuable time on it…I find it to be a valuable resource and community…and a good deal if genuine people that outweigh the numpties that you will always get in any walk of life.