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Would you leave Facebook if you could easily take your friends with you?

Over the last few weeks I’ve never seen so much abuse aimed at Facebook for the ream of changes they have made in a very short space of time (ticker, open social apps, timeline to name but a few!). Partly due to too many changes too quickly, partly down to Facebook assuming we really want to share every element of our life with others (English reserve anyone?!).

I decided to run a quick poll to test the water of whether, if it was easy to take your friends with you, people would jump ship. I posted it as a Facebook poll but pointed to it from all my social media presence to make it as fair as possible. The results are intriguing:

Yes: 15 votes (52%)

This one surprised me, I thought those vehemently annoyed with Facebook was a small majority, apparently not! I think it shows that a lot of people are starting to feel trapped on Facebook, they don’t like a lot of the changes but don’t have the energy or enough inclination to try to start again at the moment. Google+ should take heart from this.

No, I want accounts on both: 8 votes (28%)

I wonder if this number is fairly high due to that fear factor or feeling ‘left out’ or ‘left behind’ or thinking they have to be everywhere? Managing multiple accounts is increasingly problematic to do well as you need to find a new context, style & message for each one to work well, otherwise you’re duplicating not innovating.

Depends on what the majority do: 4 votes (14%)

This result also intrigued me – if there is enough buzz about a new site or enough people do the same thing, the ‘pack’ mentality comes out. For Google+, this is key that there is enough buzz on a continuing basis to make users feel everyone is moving over.

I’d rather move to Diaspora: 1 vote (3%)

The Diaspora blog says that this is an open-source and distributed community of social networks run by users that enables you to own your own personal data, control with whom you share, and discover cool stuff throughout the Web.

It looks spookily cose to Google+, but you’re in total control, if it gets the press it could be a very valid alternative to Facebook due to handing control back to the user. I’ve heard some great things about it already and I’ll certainly be trying it out!

What’s Google+: 1 vote (3%)

As big a brand as Google is, yes there are still some people who don’t realise that Google+ is the new big social network on the scene – 45 million users and growing in just a few months (knocking the spots of Facebook and Twitter’s initial growth – Google+ has benefited from launching when the world is more social media savvy and it being one of the biggest brands isn’t a bad thing).

No, I’d just stick with Facebook – 0 votes (0%)

Again, I was surprised, I thought there would be a few die hard Facebook fans out there (or maybe they were just less inclined to vote as they are happy with Facebook?).

Conclusion: As with all polls, you have to apply a heavy dose of salt as what motivates people to select one option over another can’t be fully captured but I think it makes intriguing reading, if Facebook don’t start REALLY listening to users instead of just imposing changes that they think users want (or at least add more ‘opt in, opt out’ features), they may live to regret it!

If you do want to move over to google+ and import your friends, you can do it via http://www.friendstogmail.com/ (thanks to @liveflex for that link!).

What are your thoughts, I’d love to know?

TTFN
Jan

Tags: diaspora, facebook, facebook changes, google+, Social Media