Facebook is spring-cleaning! If you notice a significant drop in your company’s Facebook page likes this week don’t panic. Facebook announced plans to begin removing likes on Pages from accounts that have been voluntarily deactivated or memorialized. Drops have already started and will likely continue over the next several weeks. Facebook states:
“To make audience data even more meaningful for businesses, we’re updating the way Page likes are counted by removing memorialized and voluntarily deactivated accounts from Pages’ like counts. This change ensures that data on Facebook is consistent and up-to-date.”
Some pages may have already lost hundreds of likes while others may only lose a few. How many likes a Page may lose will depend on how many total likes it has and how many of those likes were from pages that have since been deactivated. If a deactivated page is reactivated any business pages they have liked will regain those likes.
If you track Facebook likes each month for ROI purposes, forewarn your boss that this decrease in numbers is the result of Facebook’s clean spring-cleaning. While a drop in likes is not necessarily a welcomed update at first, marketers should see this as a benefit knowing there are no longer “fake likes” on their business page. We will now have the ability to finally more accurate numbers. Facebook explains:
are two primary benefits to removing voluntarily deactivated and memorialized Facebook accounts from Pages’ like counts: 1) Business results: Removing inactive Facebook accounts from Page audience data gives businesses up-to-date insights on the people who actively follow their Page and makes it easier for businesses to find people like their followers through tools like lookalike audiences. 2) Consistency: We already filter out likes and comments generated by deactivated or memorialized accounts from individual Page posts, so this update keeps data consistent.”
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