Some mildly unpleasant news for Facebook page managers: starting on March 12, the total number of likes on your pages may drop sharply. But on the positive side, the likes that will disappear were not legit in the first place.
The reason behind this change is that Facebook does not believe that likes generated by accounts that were memorialized for deceased users, or voluntarily deactivated, should count.
It is an attempt by Facebook to keep their network “realistic”, and is also a tough goal to manage, given that there are literally millions of fake accounts registered, with people hiding behind cartoon characters – or even more ridiculous – using blatantly photoshopped profile pictures to trick people and prank their friends.
Facebook, unsurprisingly, does not like the fake information: they want you to use your real name, and do their best to keep people from friending everyone for the sake of having “friends.” Now, they want to make page likes more meaningful to better reflect how many people actually “like” a page.
In a blog post, Facebook provided two strategic benefits to this change which can be summarized as follows:
- Improves Business Results
By removing inactive accounts from Page audience data, page administrators can have more insightful, up-to-date counts on who actively follows their Page. With tighter information, it will be easier for businesses to identify people like their followers, and enable them to better target potential new followers. - Keeps it Consistent
Likes and comments generated by deactivated or memorialized accounts on individual page posts are already filtered out by Facebook. Removing the irrelevant likes will keep the overall data more consistent with real sentiment.
However, there is some good news regarding the dropped likes: while memorialized accounts are unlikely to spring back to “active” for obvious reasons, if a deactivated account is reactivated, that account is then added back to its original page likes.
In concluding their blog post, Facebook offered the following reason and hope behind this update:
Everyone benefits from meaningful information on Facebook. It’s our hope that this update makes Pages even more valuable for businesses.
Even if seeing a drop in your page’s total number of likes gives you a small pang, look at it as an opportunity to garner real, genuine interest in your page by letting you know which accounts you should focus on engaging. In the end, if you have thousands of likes, but half are deceased, inactive, or “robot” accounts, you only want to have those 500 real accounts on your agenda. Meaningful engagement with truly interested, real people is what will give your page credence. Don’t worry about those anime characters or moose wearing top hats accounts: focus instead on those page likes that really matter, and with the properly focused engagement, you will have your total page’s likes rising as high as the thermometer in Texas on the Fourth of July.
Note: Facebook page administrators will likely be seeing a message at the top of their page this week, giving a heads-up about the drop in like numbers.
Thanks to Social Times for providing the alert!