For years, small businesses and bloggers have been running many different social media accounts. It can be exhausting and overwhelming. Often these tasks are outsourced to social media managers or scheduling tools.

Things are changing. Remember when buying Facebook likes was the rage? Organic traffic from Facebook has been steadily declining for most publishers, and many have then turned to ads to get traffic. Even that is not a given. Recently I read“Rumors are spreading fast that the days of $1-$2 cost-per-click [CPC] leads are wrapping up, and we’re looking more to $8-$9 CPC. While it feels absurd… it’s something we should prepare for.” 

As I’m sure you’re aware, Facebook has been heavily criticized lately. In light of these controversies, and other changes, is it worth keeping your Facebook page?

How to figure out the maximum traffic impact of deleting your Facebook page*

  1. In Google Analytics, go to Audience Overview.
  2. Click on Add Segment and call this “Facebook traffic”.
  3. Under Traffic Sources, enter “facebook” in the Source box.
  4. Click Save.

*If you are selling products, you should look at conversions which I don’t cover in this email.

Now you can see the percentage of your traffic over time coming from Facebook. Is it large? How is it changing over time? Of course, if you delete your Facebook page, not all traffic from Facebook will stop as people may still share your content there.

How much does it cost to maintain your Facebook page?

Next, take into consideration the costs of maintaining your Facebook page — your time, and any hard costs such as scheduling tools (for example, Meet Edgar costs $49/month.)

What are the benefits of not maintaining your Facebook page?

You have more time to focus on the social media platforms which are bringing you more traffic, and you have one less thing you feel you “ought” to do each day.

Consider an experiment…

If your traffic from Facebook is low (say less than 1% in the past 90 days), and you’re spending more than a few hours a week updating your page or paying for a scheduling tool, consider an experiment where you place your page on hold for a month.

  1. In Google Analytics, click on the little down arrow tab which beneath any graph right in the middle.
  2. Click “+ Create new annotation”.
  3. Enter the date you start the experiment, add a note “Stopping Facebook page updates” and save it.
  4. See how your traffic updates over time.

Want to learn more about how to make decisions based on your Google Analytics data? Let me know.

Thank you Thought Catalog for the photo.

Get actionable tips to grow your website

Thoughtful weekly insights (no hype!) on improving your website