Not everyone can afford a smartphone. Stop making it the primary, and sometimes the only, interface for day to day services. It's like when companies move their customer facing information onto Discord. It's shit. Fucking stop it.
Discussion
Loading...
@anon_opin @dbsalk Ditto for Facebook. If Facebook is the only way you communicate with customers, you won't be communicating with me because I won't be a customer.
one of the saddest things I see is when small businesses neglect their independent website for Facebook, and then don't even bother to update the bit of FB that you can see without having a login, to the point you don't even know if the business is still operating as their last post is 3 years ago!
I think the wider problem is a lot of business owners don't really *want* to communicate with their customers (and then wonder why they go bust within a few years)
@vfrmedia @anon_opin @dbsalk I think you're right, at least on some level. But I also truly believe that small business owners think all they need to do to build a business is put themselves on a site like Facebook and sit back and wait for the customers to come. Same goes for Instagram and Twitter and anything else. They don't seem to care that these platforms do not give them exposure to ALL potential customers.
I deleted my FB, Messenger and Instagram accounts some months ago - one thing I noticed when I was using them is Messenger is *not* reliable for the level of real-time messaging you would need for a business transaction (even compared to SIgnal, SMS or a telephone call).
And FB will equally direct people to their competitors, and in a small country like England has 0 sense of geography/distance (this is a very common flaw with all USA developed social networks)
@vfrmedia @mlanger @anon_opin @dbsalk as a business owner (with websites) I tend to try to spend more time running my business than dealing with either social media or my website.
Both are huge burdens that are neccisary to doing business while actively taking time away from the business in which I am trying to engage.
And i say that as someone who is good at these things.
Yes!
And it's not just money. Imagine trying to use a smartphone if you had Parkinson's, or age-related macular degeneration, or mild cognitive impairment. Imagine using one if you lived with an abusive partner who demanded your Pin and punished anything he saw and didn't like. Imagine needing to get rid of your smartphone to help beat your online gambling addiction, and then finding you were locked out of modern society.
We think too easily of new and shiny things, and we forget the people who don't fit the mould, who get left to fend for themselves.