It’s happened to everybody who does Facebook management for their company. After months of engagement and lively chatter back and forth, suddenly — zip, nada, silence. Suddenly those talkative types in your thread have shut their traps and your posts go ignored. Posting the wrong kind of stuff is usually what makes user engagement sink, but there might be another factor, too. A new study says at one time or another, most Facebook users log off and take a break.
According to the PEW Internet and American Life Project, the majority of Facebook account holders have been known to go months without commenting on a picture, liking a branded page or (gasp!) even playing a round of Candy Crush. This new survey released Tuesday found that 61 percent of Facebook users have at some point “taken a break” from the planet’s most popular social network.
“Pew reached 1,006 adults in the continental U.S. by phone during three days in December. Some 860 of them use the Internet, and 525 use Facebook,” writes Mashable.com.
The 525 who use Facebook were then asked if they had ever “voluntarily taken a break from using Facebook for a period of several weeks or more” during any point of being a member of the site, leading to that 61 percent affirmative statistic.
The main reason people take Facebook sabbaticals? They have lives. Twenty-one percent say their breaks were brought on by becoming too busy and no longer having time for the site. Ten percent said they lost interest, while another 10 percent said they found it to be a waste of time. Another not-so-shocking 9 percent said they took a break because of negativity and drama. According to the survey, some adults have taken a break and never returned to Facebook.
“One in five online adults (20 percent) say that they used Facebook in the past but no longer do so,” PEW writes.
This group of anti-Facebookers cites gossip, compromised accounts and privacy issues among the reasons they left and didn’t come back.
For regular account holders, Facebook breaks seem like a healthy thing to do and may even be good for perspective. For Facebook marketing experts, these kind of breaks should be a call to create less spam and more dynamic content. But what do you, our brilliant readers, think about this topic? Have you ever taken a Facebook break? Did you take that break and never return? We wanna know! Tell us in the comments section below!
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