Like almost all bait-question headlines, the answer is No. 

Six or so years ago we launched a project, and shortly after got a text from an effervescent social media manager on the client team:

I can’t find you on LinkedIn or Facebook? I wanted to tag you for our launch announcement and you’re not on the two biggest social networks?! 

It was true. We didn’t (and still don’t) like Facebook , and LinkedIn felt too self-promotional, something we’ve been pretty bad at. We saw the utility, but not the experience. It seemed to add more work than it was worth just to keep up, creating a Red Queen situation.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” 

The Red Queen to Alice in Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carrol

Running to stay in place is what social media feels like a lot of the time. You only stand out if you can push that much harder. To us, pushing harder on social media was not the work we like doing. So we stayed off.

Except for Twitter, which felt pretty good for a long stretch

Before the algorithmic/For You Page experience, you could pop up in front of followers when you had something to say, no matter how quiet you had been. We could be jokey or serious, celebratory or regretful in a compact space. That’s changed, but so has a lot more.

Twitter in its X incarnation is a sewer, rife with hostile and conspiratorial voices lost to anti-democratic sentiments, flooding the space with violent and hateful rhetoric under a tattered veneer of free speech, speckled with an advertising stock of trinket stores and scams. 

Does that sound like the kind of place any self-respecting brand should be? Not to us. 

And that brings us to the uncomfortable part for those managing social channels, because that kind of work is measured by things like followers and engagement. Voluntarily dropping off a platform is volunteering to have lower numbers than the year before. 

The real question of staying on Twitter isn’t about numbers going down. It’s about being able to say we’ve consciously removed our brands and participation from a place rampant with hate speech, run by a conspiracy-addled owner beholden to overt racists and anti-LGBTQ+ forces. 

We can all but guarantee that when put in that context, anyone worth working for will be ok with some numbers going down. 

Moving to LinkedIn

For us the decision was easy but frankly took too long to make. We permanently parked our Twitter account and pulled our little social media boat onto new shores at LinkedIn. We’re earnest about making a new presence there, having seen some good things happen for our peers there. As our repertoire has come to include website accessibility and donations, we’re seeing the benefit of reaching people outside our usual Vancouver community.

So after 12 years of not saying it, we’ll say it now: we’d like to add you to our professional network ????.