Hey Lush, are you ok?

Hey, did you hear about Lush?

In a shocking move, Lush Labs has announced that they’ll soon be shutting down all of their UK social media accounts. They have 202k Twitter followers, 569k on Instagram and 423k on Facebook. I’m not good at math, but that looks like close to 1.2 million social media followers in the UK alone. That’s pretty significant, especially when you’re considering basically wiping the slate clean on your social media presence.

So why is Lush making this drastic move? They claim it’s because they’re “tired of fighting with algorithms” and they want to cut “out the middleman between ourselves and the Lush community”. Their customers are encouraged to contact them via email, phone, or the Lush website.

Huh. Ok.

I’m coming at this from a customer support perspective, since that’s what I do for a living, and frankly it sounds like a nightmare.

Part of what we use social media for is to field, and then ignore, all of the “You suck!” and “Dirty liberal bastards!” comments that would otherwise have to be handled by an actual person. No support rep wants to deal with those comments because a) they’re emotionally draining to deal with hour after hour, and b) there’s literally nothing that can be done for those people. They don’t have a real problem, they just hate us and what we stand for, and that’s fine with us. We’re not for everybody.

So what’s Lush’s angle? There are still people who dislike the company and what they stand for, and a real person is going to have to talk to those people now. I suppose they’re getting a lot of free press from this move, since not having social media is basically unheard of now. I’m really curious how this is going to impact the company.

What do you think about this move?

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