Picking up from yesterday –
I wasn’t using Facebook much and I knew I’d pushed myself into something great. To help with the transition, I basically cleared out my profile.
I deleted almost all of my old statuses. I hid my old wall posts so they’re only visible to me and the people who posted them. I deleted practically all of my photos (but as of now have left three that I liked).
I even untagged myself from a lot of stuff (but not everything, because that was time consuming and I still appreciate all the Price is Right statuses I’m tagged in :-)). But I might get to the point where I either hide all those old tags or untag myself if I really want to gut my page.
I’ll admit that some of the things were actually hard to delete! There were some statuses and photos that actually had really nice comments on them. (On very few that I felt I really wasn’t quite ready to let go, I took screenshots just for me.) I was surprised that it was as hard as it was to let go of something I don’t even like!
But shockingly, it was… Of course, it wasn’t actually hard to let go of Facebook itself. It was hard to let go of memories of people caring about me – even if it was in the teeniest, tiniest way possible (which would be Facebook).
I haven’t officially “let go.” Not everyone is going to so easily jump on your bandwagon and just communicate with you through your page. Though thankfully, I do have some super cool friends who message me through my page now so I don’t have to go on my lame profile. Granted, when I’m wildly famous and have some social media maven running my page, I’m probably going to regret asking all my close friends to send all our normal messages back and forth through my page.
There’s not anything secret in those messages, just you know, your personal life is sort of separate from your public life… Though I know that line gets blurred more and more all the time as time marches forward!
Back to the point, I’m not permanently deleting my Facebook profile. I still want people who don’t like my page (or somehow don’t know I have a page) to be able to communicate with me. So, I’m keeping it open mainly for messages, somewhat for easy tagging when friends have a picture or something they want to share with me.
(And I’m keeping it open as a way to easily stay in touch with people with whom I’ve worked with before and hope to work with again in the future – because to me, that’s sort of the main point of Facebook… that and easily being able to keep in touch with friends when they’re in the service.)
But I’m leaving it as abandoned as I can. I don’t want people to think of it as their go-to place to talk to me. I also changed my profile photo to just be links to my other social media sites so that hopefully if people wonder why the page is so abandoned, they’ll understand that they should go see me on any other millions of platforms where I’m extremely public and readily accessible.
And for those who say Facebook is their platform of choice – guess what?! I have a Facebook page! You can still use Facebook to contact me and hear about my life. Yee haw.