Let’s put the tl;dr of this post right at the beginning: where do y’all stand in terms of how much you’re using Facebook nowadays?  I killed my Clark Kent personal account … a month ago, maybe? and I haven’t missed it a bit.  My usage of Facebook was always pretty idiosyncratic; I never let a post stay on the site for more than a couple of weeks, only rarely uploaded pictures, and damn near never played any of the quizzes or games that are getting them in trouble right now– mostly because I knew good and goddamn well that they were bullshit data-mining schemes from the beginning.  I’ve always hated the site, even when I first set up my account; the only thing keeping me around was a small handful of people who I was basically only in touch with through Facebook, and I made sure most of those few friended Luther before I killed my account.

And right now I’m side-eyeing my author account, hard, and wondering how important it actually is in terms of actual sales and driving traffic to the blog.  The problem is, the answer seems to be “pretty important”:

So here we see that in the last ninety days, Facebook is my #1 referrer out of search engines and WordPress itself.  But it’s not a huge number; I could find a way to make up for 500 hits in a 90-day period if I wanted to commit myself a bit more to bringing traffic levels back up to where they used to be around here.

This is a bit of a bigger deal, though:

… yeah.  If I look at all my referrers, for the life of the blog, Facebook is #1 with a bullet for driving viral content– in other words, anything that hits big is going to hit big is going to hit big because of Facebook pushing it.  My #1 post in history has thirty-nine thousand Facebook shares.  That’s a big deal!  And it all started with people who have Liked the Luther Siler page spreading that post.  I’m not certain that cutting off that audience is an especially wise move.  I mean, I still have Twitter, but Twitter can’t drive traffic like Facebook can, or at least not in the same ways.

So.  Yeah.  Back to the lede: how are you using Facebook nowadays?  More or less than you used to?  Have you killed your account recently, or are you thinking about it?  Let me know.