It’s not an easy decision to shut something down. You can’t know whether you’re making the right decision until after it’s done.

Sure, you can think about the situation and its effects for a long time, but in the end can only go with your gut instinct as a team.

I don’t like Facebook, but that doesn’t mean I don’t go on it multiple times a day. I’m sure you do too. I’d had enough of it. I decided to axe the Facebook page for Contentacle.

1. It’s all or nothing

If I end up liking a Facebook page (which is rarely), I’m likely to never see its posts. That’s because of the news feed algorithm. All the posts I see come from The Verge and WIRED, and they post many articles a day. I can’t compete with them.

I didn’t expect anyone to scroll down far enough on their feed to see our posts. As it was such a new page I didn’t get any interaction.

According to Victor Luckerson at TIME, the news feed algorithm mainly relies on the actions of its users.

Writing “congratulations” in a comment signals the post is probably about a big life event, so it will get a boost. Liking an article after you clicked it is a stronger positive signal than liking before, since it means you probably read the piece and enjoyed it.

Victor Luckerson, TIME

Because there was no interaction taking place on the page, I didn’t stand a chance. Maybe it was too early, but I felt like it wasn’t going to work out.

2. Not enough hours in a day

Nobody has enough time, and we’re all busy. At Contentacle, there’s currently two of us.

We work from 6am to 6pm, 7 days a week. That’s around 80 hours a week not including breaks (i.e. walking to Starbucks). I don’t have the time to maintain a Facebook page as well as a Twitter account.

Tools like Buffer help, but I like to add a personal touch and keep an eye on performance. I’d much rather focus on content generation than taking the time to build a community on Facebook, at the moment at least.

3. Twitter is going well for us

We’ve had a Twitter account for just over a month now and we think it’s performing well. In the last 28 days we’ve sent out a total of 438 tweets, received 48.1K impressions, attracted 3,626 profile visits, had 69 mentions and gained 463 followers.

That’s not bad, but we still want it to improve. We love sharing the best content, and I think Twitter is currently the best platform to do that on. Why waste time sharing content on Facebook that nobody will see?

4. At the start, it’s just friends

Most of my friends and family aren’t interested in inbound marketing and that’s fine (although they totally should be). The only way I could get up to 7 likes was by inviting my friends to like the page, and that felt wrong.

They weren’t interested in the best writing tips, how to create an awesome blog, a content planning calendar or why inbound marketing is so hot right now.

I might have made a terrible decision, maybe we’re missing out on a ton of traffic. Only time will tell. I’d love to know if you gain anything from your Facebook page.