Closing Facebook & Twitter
A 4 Minute read
We Closed Them in 2022. Nothing Bad Happened.
Thousands of followers. Years of posts. Gone on the 1st of June 2022.
It wasn't an easy decision. Deleting an audience you spent years building feels reckless, even when you know the audience isn't buying anything.
Four years on, here's the honest account of why we did it and what happened next.
Because plenty of firms are sat where we were, quietly aware that two of their channels do nothing, and unable to justify switching them off.
Why we did it
The return was terrible and getting worse.
Effort in, almost nothing out. Content that took real time, glanced at by people scrolling past on their way somewhere else.
That's not a criticism of the platforms. They're built for attention, and attention isn't what we needed. We needed managing partners with a specific problem, and they were not on Facebook thinking about professional services.
The platforms had drifted from us, and we from them.
The privacy questions around Meta were well documented, and we'd had our own experiences. Twitter, now X, was heading somewhere we didn't want our name attached to.
But honestly? That wasn't the deciding factor. If either had been producing clients, we'd have thought harder.
They weren't. That made it easy.
We were doing it out of obligation.
Somebody once said businesses need to be on social media. So we were. Nobody ever revisited whether that was true for our business.
That's the actual admission here. It wasn't a strategy. It was a habit with a login.
What happened next
Nothing bad.
No drop in enquiries. No client asking where we'd gone. Not one prospect mentioning it, in four years.
What we got back was time, the hours previously spent producing content for audiences that were never going to hire us, redirected into the things that do work for a firm like ours: LinkedIn, case studies, the site, and outreach that reaches specific people when something's actually changed at their end.
Same energy. Different address.
And it's genuinely pleasant not writing things that don't convert. Small pleasures.
Should you do the same?
Maybe not. This is where these posts usually overreach.
Plenty of businesses do brilliantly on Facebook. Consumer brands, local services, anything visual, anything with a community. If that's you, ignore all of this.
The test isn't whether a platform works. It's whether it works for the people you sell to.
Three questions:
Are your actual buyers there, in that mindset? Not "present on the platform." Thinking about this kind of problem while they're on it
Has it produced a client? Ever. Name them
Would you notice if it stopped? If the honest answer is no, you have your answer
We failed all three. Twice.
Where firms get this wrong
The usual suspects:
Deleting out of frustration → then rejoining in six months when someone panics
Keeping it "just in case" → a channel nobody owns, running on obligation
Confusing reach with relevance → 4,000 followers, none of them buyers
Cutting the wrong one → dropping the platform that quietly works because it's less fashionable
Not reinvesting the time → cancelling two channels and doing nothing more with the third
That last one wastes the whole exercise. Cutting is only useful if the effort goes somewhere better.
How to decide
1. Check where your last ten clients came from. Not where you posted. Where they actually came from.
2. Name a client from each channel. If you can't, that's the channel to question.
3. Count the real cost. Not the ad spend. The hours, the reviewing, the low-grade guilt about not posting.
4. Pick the one channel your buyers genuinely use. For professional services that's usually LinkedIn, and it isn't close.
5. Redirect the time on the same day. Into case studies, the site, or reaching people when something changes at their end.
6. Decide properly — delete or commit. The middle option is the worst one available.
The bit most people skip
Most firms won't delete. They'll just stop posting.
That's worse than either choice.
Because the account stays there. And when a prospect checks you out — which they will — they find a page whose last post was in 2021.
Think about what that says. Not "they've focused their marketing." It says are these people still trading?
An abandoned profile is worse than no profile, because it answers a question nobody wanted answered. A dormant page with three followers and a four-year-old post actively undermines you at the exact moment someone was deciding whether you're a serious firm.
So do one or the other.
Close it properly, or resource it properly.
The zombie account in between is the only genuinely bad option — and it's the one almost everybody picks, because it requires no decision at all.
The takeaway
We had thousands of followers on two platforms and not one client to show for either.
So we closed them, put the time into channels our buyers actually use, and nobody noticed except us.
Check where your clients really came from. Be honest about which channels have never produced one.
Then decide. Delete it or resource it.
Just don't leave it sitting there, quietly telling people you might have gone out of business.
