Take control
Following much consideration, ALHAUS has made the decision to remove itself from Instagram and Twitter going forward.
Following announcements from major brands such as Lush, Bottega Venetta and Louis Vuitton and with 2022 on the horizon, it has been the right opportunity for us to reassess and reevaluate how we move forward.
Many will have seen the commotion created by bath bomb and cosmetics company Lush as it chose to turn its back on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat recently. And Lush isn’t the first global brand to step away from social media. Bottega Veneta exited social media entirely in January of 2021 and instead launched a quarterly digital magazine called Issue in April of the same year. Louis Vuitton has periodically wiped their Instagram feed or ‘gone dark’ on social.
Jack Constantine, Chief Digital Officer for Lush eloquently summed up the brand’s decision to remove itself from the world of social media with this statement;
“We wouldn’t ask our customers to meet us down a dark and dangerous alleyway – but some social media platforms are beginning to feel like places no one should be encouraged to go. Something has to change. We hope that platforms will introduce strong best practice guidelines, and we hope that international regulation will be passed into law. But we can’t wait. We feel forced to take our own action to shield our customers from the harm and manipulation they may experience whilst trying to connect with us on social media.”
Lush previously toyed with the idea of coming off social media in 2019, where “in the UK Lush stopped posting to Instagram and Facebook due to increasing concerns over how much control these big platforms had on how many people, and which people, saw anything we posted. This interaction is controlled for no other reason than to extract profit for themselves, and the idea that a main route of communication with our customers could be regulated by a third party was worrying.”
They bolster this decision by remarking that, “it is not enough for companies to just stop placing paid advertising; people and their time are the currency of these channels and we do not want our content to be used by hidden algorithms designed to hold people captive on a channel.”
For the ALHAUS team, we no longer feel that dedicating time, energy and expenditure to social media is viable or worthwhile. Not only is social media having a significant and detrimental effect on users’ mental health but the control in which these social media platforms have over everything from who sees what and when to what they personally promote on feeds is both concerning and no longer aligned with our core values and business model.
We believe consumers are looking for brands who live their values and at ALHAUS we no longer feel that sharing on Instagram and Twitter aligns with ours. We are keen to prioritise the right kind of relationship with the right kind of audience in a curated and purposeful way, rather than a broad relationship with a wide, unengaged audience.
We’re not a brand that wants to appeal to all of the people all of the time; we are a niche agency with very specific services that we offer to a select cohort of clients. Attempting to find our audience or potential clients in a mass marketplace no longer makes sense to us.
At ALHAUS we concern ourselves with creating, crafting and having control over the stories that we tell, not leaving this to an algorithm that behaves in an often biased and concealed manner.
Via social media, brand awareness, brand relationships and brand building are condensed down to the number of seconds that an individual may or may not see any specific post, on platforms that prioritise endless scrolling and self profit.
Anyone who’s also been frustrated when the likes of Instagram, Facebook or Twitter goes down for anywhere from a number of hours to a day or so will be aware of the lack of control we as users have. As a brand this is all the more apparent. Putting your business presence and ultimately your feed’s fate in the hands of a platform that you have absolutely no control of is no longer attractive to many.
If you haven’t already seen author and professor Cal Newport’s TED talk on ‘Why you should quit social media’, the video has been viewed almost nine million times. Tailored specifically towards Facebook, this video debunks some of the common objections to finally deleting your own personal Facebook account but remains as relevant as ever as new social media platforms appear and others change, not necessarily for the better. Just because these technologies are available to us does not mean that we have to or are being forced to use them. Deciding to step away from them should allow us to be more productive in other areas of our lives or businesses, remove the background noise of incessant chatter and allow our time to be better spent altogether.
You will continue to find ALHAUS on our website where we’ll be adapting what we put out and releasing our monthly digital magazine, as always. We will be strategically using other platforms such as LinkedIn and The Dots to tailor our output and content to a much more relevant audience, while we invest in alternative marketing strategies such as additional print issues and a more targeted approach to advertising.
For more information please contact us – we’re always happy to chat.