Leaving social media: Why I took my editing business off social media in 2025

This blog post discusses how social media might be damaging for your business and your well-being, and why the mood has changed so much in 2025. If you're considering leaving social media, read on!

Just after the pandemic started, it felt like the world was moving online, and social media was a big part of that.

Back in 2020, my business was fairly new, and I was excited to learn how to use all the different social media channels. So I joined the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading social media team. I took some business-as-usual courses, too, in content marketing and social media marketing (from Jammy Digital and Andrew & Pete).

My main love, though, was—and is—blogging. I set up an editing blog and used it to steer my business in the direction I wanted it to move—toward developmental editing and speculative fiction. This was a long game, but I got great results from it fairly quickly.

Social media as a time sink

I kept data, crunched the numbers over the years and gradually began to realize that social media was using up a lot of my time—at least an hour or two a day—and making me feel anxious (for instance, about etiquette when replying).

Yet my clients were coming through other channels – mostly through my SEO/blog, directories, and existing networks. Sure, I would get a few gigs indirectly through social media, usually when someone would ask for an editor on a social media platform, and I got the odd cool job directly through a platform. But those jobs tended to be not as good a fit as the jobs I’d get through other channels.

I started to find social media boring and increasingly stressful. The same topics would be discussed on repeat (sample edits, hard-to-spot typos, grammar issues, scams in publishing, and even editors simply listing all the work they'd done each month in a round-up).

I’m highly empathic, and I could also sense that several close editor friends were posting from a place of anxiety.

The ugly side of social media

One of the biggest dangers of social media is that you often don’t know who you’re talking to. The new consultant or coach who starts following you and commenting could be a bot, a sexual predator, a scam artist.

And it would take a lot of energy to carefully vet everyone you come into contact with there. The ease and simplicity of use of these tools therefore offers a route in for dangerous people to start building trust with you and your business. Gen-AI has compounded this problem, making it harder to gauge lies from truth.

Then there were the pile-ons. I worked with an author who made a comment about an editor quoting her thousands of dollars for an edit. This post went viral and then loads of editors and self-publishing people chimed in, some even making threats. It got nasty very quickly, and while I didn’t comment and wasn’t at the center, I saw first-hand how damaging “going viral” could be.

I got in a rhythm with making posts for a while and built an audience, especially on LinkedIn, but I still found I got most clients – and especially the good ones – from elsewhere.

I wondered, also, about who was most active on these platforms? My intuition was that the most active editors on social media platforms skewed toward less successful, because I knew when I was super busy, I would spend less time there.

Social media felt like a lever I could pull when I had a space in my schedule to fill. And this did work when author or editor friends noticed and told their network. But I could equally have pulled that lever by emailing them or leaving a note in my newsletter.

And the few clients I found via social media often weren’t the best for my niche. An edit should be a carefully thought out decision, not something decided on a whim after a well-timed Instagram post sucks you in.

From Amelia Hruby’s podcast Off the Grid, I learned that social media pushes an “influencer” model of marketing. The platform is configured to stroke your ego and make you want to stay on it for as long as possible, building an increasingly large audience of people who respect you and like your vibe. But for most people, building an audience is hard work, and you don’t need to do it if you sell expensive services like editing and consulting services. You can just focus on building relationships because you only need a handful of clients each year.

I realized that sending emails and keeping in touch with existing clients (relationship marketing) was a much better use of my time than thinking up clever social media posts; and views and popularity did not necessarily convert into paying customers.

From Off the Grid, I also learned about the dangers of relying on algorithmic space, where we are at the whims of big corporations. And the more algorithmic a space, the less creative that space is – because creativity is all about playing with rules and doing things differently.

Using social media smartly

I saw a few consultants and editors in my field use social media in a canny way. For instance, not being present at all on a platform except for two months a year when they were selling a course. But the vast majority of editors I knew seemed to use it as a space to hang out. Editing is a solitary job, so I can see the attraction, but I started to prefer spaces like Discord and Slack for socializing because they don’t push you to spend all your time hanging out there.

Leaving social media completely

Social media use was also particularly addictive for me, as I’m closer to the anxious attachment end of the spectrum than the avoidant.

With the political chaos of 2025, and Zuckerberg’s January statement, ushering in a new era of lies, with the death of fact-checking and the growth of AI generated content, taking my business of all Meta platforms was a political action I wanted to make.

My data hadn’t lied – my work requests didn’t decrease in 2025, and I made more money than usual, probably from the time I’d saved. So in June I deleted LinkedIn, and in September 2025 I finally deleted my personal Facebook account.

I’ll report back at the end of the year on my findings!

In the meantime, if you want to keep in touch or learn more about my business, sign up for my newsletter instead.