Will brands start rejecting the social rat race?
If you love bath bombs, you will definitely have heard of Lush Cosmetics. The company that makes body products announced on Twitter that they would be suspending all social media operations in the UK. Considering the fact that they have more than a million combined followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, this is huge.
That account name will close on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram along with Lush Kitchen, Lush Times, Lush Life, Soapbox and Gorilla.
Announcing the news the company said it was “tired of fighting with algorithms” and did not want to “pay to appear” in newsfeeds.
“We don’t want to limit ourselves to holding conversations in one place, we want social to be placed back in the hands of our communities – from our founders to our friends,” it said in a statement.
Their decision to leave social media has many customers and marketers baffled. Social media is the way to communicate and grow in today’s day and age. Letting go of 200,000+ Twitter followers, 400,000+ Facebook followers and almost 570,000 Instagram followers have been deemed as madness by many marketing experts.
The executives at Lush Cosmetics UK are justifying their decision as a response to bizarre social media algorithms and the fact that they have to pay to appear in people’s feeds. They want to get rid of the middlemen and want to be in direct contact with their customers, which was confirmed by the tweet when they mentioned that they had decided it was time to bid farewell to some of their social channels and open up the conversation between them and us instead.
The company believes that this decision would allow them to communicate better with its customers and make both sides properly heard. The tweet continued by saying that they were switching up social. What they meant by that is that they are going to establish channels of direct communication with their customers and engage with them to determine their needs.
Lush executives said that Lush is a community, yet they were unable to reach all parts of it due to algorithms. They also added that the company is made up of many voices, and it is time for all of them to be heard.
Their “founders to friends” hands down approach is going to affect all of their customers. If you followed them on social media, you are bound to feel some changes too.
