When Facebook Stopped Mattering
Woke up one morning and half my audience was gone. Facebook had changed their algorithm again—pushed friends and family higher, buried anything with a link. So anyone who followed me there was suddenly not seeing my posts. I panicked. Everyone else publishing online was panicking too. We’d built our readership partly on that platform, and they’d just shut the door.
Then I checked the traffic numbers. They were up. Way up. The homepage alone had grown by 5000 percent. Five thousand. People had apparently decided they didn’t need Facebook to find me. They just went directly to the website. Used a browser. Did the thing that was always possible but felt impossible after years of relying on social algorithms to deliver your audience.
It’s obvious in retrospect. People could always find me without Facebook. But algorithms make you forget you have other options. They promise to deliver your readers to you, and you believe it until the moment they don’t. And then you feel ghosted by a platform. Which you were. But that’s not actually the relationship you need.
What surprised me more than the traffic increase was the quality. People coming from direct visits clicked through more articles, spent more time on the site. Better engagement across the board. Someone typing in a URL is already committed, already choosing to be here. Not just doomscrolling and accidentally landing on a link.
I could have deleted the Facebook page then. Everyone was saying delete Facebook anyway. But here’s the problem: advertisers still look at social numbers. They still use follower counts as a viability metric, even though none of that actually translates to revenue. Kill the page and you become harder to sell to sponsors. And I need sponsorships more than I need to make a moral point.
So the page still runs. An algorithm pushes my posts to maybe thirty people a week. A handful. Real people though, who found me without being prompted, without an algorithm deciding it was a good time to show them. And that matters more than I expected. The whole thing is backwards—I’m more successful after losing the platform that was supposed to distribute my work—but it’s cleaner somehow. No waiting for permission. No performing for an algorithm’s amusement. Just here, and the people who want to be here know where to find me.