Every time I open Facebook, I see endless businesses posting about their engagement levels, likes, performance, new followers; begging people to like, comment, watch. It’s all they post about now. It’s so boring.

And then I ask myself - how is this benefitting their businesses? How is this adding value to me as a potential customer?

How exactly is Facebook supporting small businesses? Or any size business for that matter, we are all subject to the same rules. They are not. Go and Google how many people are making a living from the Facebook payouts. Can you find even one story - of an average person / business - not a social media influencer?

To even start getting money, you need to jump through endless hoops.

Do you not see that all this achieves one thing, and only one thing - to keep you tied to Facebook’s vision. To their platform. Forever. Until you die.

The social media giants figured out long ago how to enslave us. There’s a reason all the notification icons are red. We now live in a planet with billions of people addicted to social media. I freely admit I am one of those addicts. The algorithms have been finetuned to keep us hooked for hours and hours every day.

Have you seen the stats of how much of his free time an 18-year-old will spend behind a screen in his lifetime? It comes from this TedX Talk.

26 YEARS!

If it doesn’t shock you then I don’t know.

The time it takes to meet all Facebook’s ever moving targets is taking us all away from our purposes. Did you start a business just to get followers on Facebook? If you did, that’s just sad.

Likes don’t equal money!

Views don’t equal money!

Unless you have hundreds of thousands of followers. Unless you are a fulltime influencer and that’s all you. Unless social media is your business. Unless you manage social media for people.

But for most people, it’s not. There are countless other business types in the world. As the saying goes - butchers, bakers, candlestick makers.

We as business owners, entrepreneurs, are not focusing on our skills anymore, the knowledge we have to share with the world, the value we want to bring.

All we are doing now, is designing content that abides to the social media giants’ rules. And those rules are psychotic. “Post all day, every day, but if you post too fast, you'll get shadow banned and noone will see your page for at least 2 weeks”. Really? You also have to tell your followers not to batch like your posts or you'll get shadow banned. Think how ridiculous this sounds. You're doing all this to get likes, grow your page, get engagement; but you're penalized if you any of that too fast.

Have we all gone mad?

It’s time to take back our power! This is not serving us as a species on this planet. We will never get anything of value done if we all do is to continue to bow to Facebook, X, Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube… etc.

The amount and effort you are putting in to meet social media platform demands is crippling your business. This is just one example, 55 posts a week! Who’s got the time or energy for that! I don’t know about you, but I have a business to run.

If you put the same level of effort, time and energy into making better products and giving outstanding services to your clients, you won’t need to worry about social media to get business.

Yes, you need some sort of social media footprint. It does add credibility to your business and makes it easy to find you. But you do not need tens of thousands of followers? No. Do you want to be famous? Or do you want to be rich?

Those endless levels of “achievement” are called gamification. It’s how platforms keep people engaged in them. It’s on galactic level at Facebook. And it's super successful at keeping you locked into their vision of how the want to rule. Your vision doesn't matter to them.

Go back to basics.

Why did you start your business. Why do you still have your business? Do you still want your business? Or do you want to carry on being Facebook’s personal slave? And if you are, you might as well give up your business and go fulltime into managing Facebook pages where you can do that all day long.

But if you love what you do, and believe in what you do, there are other platforms where you can promote your business. Beehiiv, Patreon, Skool, Mighty Media, LinkedIn, Shopify, Google Adwords to name just a few. Find platforms designed to support your business and get money into your pocket on fair terms. Use Facebook to connect with friends and family, and share adventures. But as a business empowerment tool? I'm voting no on that one.

You are getting lost to Facebook. Stop. Take a step back and ask yourself if this is what you want to do with your life. Are you living solely in the hope of “going viral”. The ego in all of us wants that. It’s the dream we’ve been sold. In the meantime, all we are doing is fulfilling Facebook’s dream of ultimate world domination. And their friends like Tiktok are helping.

Wake up from your slumber and get back to your business.