We Were Afraid to Take Our Business off Social Media. It Turned Out to Be One of the Best Decisions We’ve Made.
I lead a mission-driven small business that prides itself on a healthy ambition and a track record of innovation. This is the story of how we left social media and what ensued.
Let’s start with a little background. In 2015, my business partner, Stephen, and I left our jobs at YouTube to start an independent candle company.
Notwithstanding this cringy headline, we genuinely wanted to share the sense of connection that candles had helped us find in a world of endless digital distractions — distractions that we, by virtue of our roles, had been contributing to. We envisioned our company as an experiment to test whether a business could successfully operate in a way that was regenerative, for people and the planet.
“You Can’t Start a Business in 2015 Without Social Media.”
When we set out, the prevailing wisdom said social media was simply unavoidable if you wanted to get a new business off the ground. So for years, Stephen and I poured time and money into social media, despite feeling a dissonance between this investment and our purpose of connection.
In hindsight it seems obvious that relying on social media platforms could not align with the purpose of a business founded out of a distaste for attention-mining and digital addiction. But it took us five years to finally pause to truly take stock of how social media was aiding and hindering us.
What Social Media Was Doing for Us
When we looked beyond the metrics provided by the platforms themselves — the likes, the views, the shares — and honestly appraised what social media was doing for us, it was proving to be unprofitable and precarious. When looked at holistically, it wasn’t actually a cost-effective way for us to reach new customers. And we were at the whim of sudden algorithm changes from an autocratic corporation with competing goals to both us and our customers.
Furthermore, Stephen and I spent roughly a third of our time, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars per year in wages, managing our profiles and all the noise that went with it. We had little to show for it except anxiety, frustration, and doubt.
Our social media planning conversations would lead us to look for ways to launch new products at a rate that far exceeded our ability to do so sustainably, leading to inevitable tensions and a sense of powerlessness. It takes a minute to post an attention grabbing photo, but it takes a year or two to bring a new high-quality candle to market.
Is Leaving Even an Option?
What held us back, even as our sense of unease mounted, was a fear that opting out would be bad for business; that if we broke the cycle, we would consign ourselves to irrelevance.
Some advisors warned us that leaving social media meant we’d have no way to share our story with a broad audience. New customers would never hear about us; existing customers would grow bored of our silence and move on to more exciting candle companies with better memes and edgier tweets.
Even our biggest fans might see quitting social media as a sign of weakness; that we’d just given up and let the platforms revert to their toxic means (as if we were the last rampart preventing them from being toxic!). We’d most likely stagnate and slowly shrink to bankruptcy. Worse, we would be so. Not. Cool.
Eventually though, the contradictions between our purpose and the goals of social media — manipulating user behavior to maximize ad revenue — became too much for us to ignore.
We accepted the reality that we were probably never cool in the first place, and in January 2021 we stopped using social media for good.
I remember how tight the muscles in my neck felt the day we made the announcement, how uncertain I was of what would happen. Would people still take our company seriously? We had real employees who were actually quite cool — would they quit out of fear of unfashionable association?
Moving Toward Something Better
We pressed “publish” on our last social media posts and sent a corresponding email to our subscribers. I expected, at best, indifference. But I was ready for some kind of admonishment from the outside world. I had absurd visions of pro-social media activists canceling us and calling us elitist or any other epithet my creative imagination could rustle up. It was pretty ridiculous. Human brains work in strange ways.
Instead of being mobbed by hate messages, our inbox was flooded with positive emails from our customers, many of whom shared their own reflections on social media. We had a decently engaged community before this, but for the first time we felt like people were genuinely paying attention and profoundly connecting with us.
All our other fears turned out to be nothing more than superstitions. Our customers and our employees rallied around the decision. We freed up time to pursue activities that align with our purpose of connection. That new work happens to be both more enjoyable and more profitable for us.
Shifting Our Attention, with Intention
I won’t lie to you and say our revenue instantly skyrocketed when we got off social media, but I can tell you it was financially a non-event. Many things have had positive and negative effects on our revenue in the past couple years, and our move off social media didn’t result in a meaningful short-term change in either direction. But in the long term, I can say confidently that we will be better off as we’ve been able to shift investment to channels that are more resilient.
With the time, energy, and money we’ve freed up, we’ve been able to focus on connecting with our customers in ways that are not unilaterally controlled by a private monopoly with competing goals to ours. Mediums like email newsletters, blog posts, and podcasts allow us to tell our story in detail and on our terms.
We’ve also sought more opportunities to build relationships offline by partnering with other organizations that share our values, organizing more in-person events, and joining advocacy efforts that align with our purpose.
The people who discover us through these avenues are choosing to engage with us rather than having our message force-fed to them in the midst of doomscrolling. Our first encounter is a positive one, and like a great first date, it sets us up for a long, happy relationship.
Money-wise, these customers spend more, both right off the bat and in the long term, and they’re much more pleasant to interact with (they actually send us love letters!). These relationships bring us both personal and financial fulfillment. They nourish us more deeply than the fleeting, transactional interactions we had on social media.
It took us a little time to overcome the habits we had developed over those years of checking a dashboard every five minutes. But I can say for myself that my mental health and capacity for ambitious long-term planning and leadership have improved.
In addition, we now have the freedom to write from our own voice and perspective; we don’t have to guess what memes the algorithm wants to feed on that day.
There Is Something Bigger Happening Here
I’m not here to say everyone should follow in our footsteps, or that companies like us taking action will be sufficient to address the well-documented harms of social media. (Regulation, like we’ve done with new technologies in the past, is essential.)
I know many company leaders and entrepreneurs reading this do want to quit social media but worry they’ll irreparably harm the projects they’ve poured their passions into. We had those fears, and for us they proved unfounded.
Beyond our candle studio, there is a cultural change under way, happening fast. Major voices have already left what used to be called Twitter and the attention economy is bending under the weight of its own contradictions. We have reached a critical mass of concerned parents, disillusioned kids, and elected officials angry about how anti-social social media really is. More and more individuals are leaving social media behind, or trying to minimize how much they use it.
Now is the perfect time to consider whether your organization might be better served — and better serve the public — by investing its resources in other places.
B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
