Why I Restarted on Facebook

I have been thinking about Facebook a lot lately, and I took a very odd series of steps over the past few days. To make a long story short, I have completely started over on Facebook.

If you are still interested, let me give you the longer story.

I have a very strong love/hate relationship with Facebook. It is a great way to keep up with folks, and it drives the most traffic to our blog–by far–of any site.

However, I had grown weary of how Facebook has spiraled on me. I’m sure it will again, but I have been on the site since 2007 and it had gotten to be a fire hose of information that I just could not keep up with.

So,I tried to think of solutions.

First, I thought about deleting Facebook completely. I’m sure I could do that, but I really do use it for legitimate purposes that I find important. From connecting with family and friends to running a few groups, it really is a great tool.

Then, I considered “becoming a page” on Facebook. In fact, I went through with it, and started a page only account. This really seemed like the perfect solution to gain simplicity in using Facebook. However, if you only have an account as a “page,” you cannot be a part of, or run, any Facebook groups. All you can do is work with pages that you either create or administer. Since I run a few groups, this was not an option.

However, once I had become a “page,” there was no going back. You can go from a personal profile to a page on Facebook, but you can’t go back. I considered sticking with the page, but just couldn’t do it.

Then, it hit me: why not just start over. This way, I can get a fresh start with Facebook completely. Sure, I don’t have all the information on my site yet, but I can get a clean start and rebuild it however I want. It will take awhile to build the site back up, but that’s okay. While that’s going on, I can enjoy actually keeping up with people again, instead of getting the completely overwhelming amount of information that was coming at me before.

What This Means

Here’s the bottom line. I am only going to add friends on Facebook who are people I actually know and interact with. Obviously, people from the groups I run will be added, as will many preaching friends, and others I keep touch with from different times in life (college, 9th Avenue, etc.).

However, I am not going to add everyone back. I had so many “friends” who were people I had never even met or communicated with. There’s nothing wrong with using Facebook this way, but it was taking way from me actually enjoying the site for what I want to use it for.

Now, won’t this hurt the traffic to our blog? Absolutely it will (in the short-term, anyway). Facebook provides the most traffic to our site by far, but that was not the original reason we used Facebook, so I don’t mind taking this short-term hit. We have restarted our blog page on Facebook, and would like you to “like” it, and that will help us, but we are going to focus our efforts on Facebook on our friends and family.

If you enjoy our blog, you can “like” our page here:

So, we start over. I’m actually glad this happened, in a way, because it will help me re-learn how to use Facebook more effectively.

QUESTION: So, what are your thoughts? Have you ever thought about deleting or starting over on Facebook? Share your reactions in the comments!

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