Your Facebook Company Page is About to Lose Likes! But, Why?

Attention marketers! Your Facebook business page is about to lose likes!

Wait, what?!?!?!? But, we’ve worked so hard to gain likes!

Wipe the sweat off your forehead and re-apply you deodorant if need be, there’s no need to panic. Zuckerberg isn’t trying to slay your business because they need your business! They’re simply scraping through Facebook accounts and removing inactive accounts whether that be a Facebook account manually deactivated by the user or an account that hasn’t been active for an extended period of time. On Thursday, March 6, Facebook warned marketers that this change will naturally effect the number of page likes to your company page. “The change ensures that data on Facebook is consistent and up-to-date,” Facebook says in an attempt to calm worried social media employees.

When is this happening?

Facebook was vague, but in their news post they said “over the coming weeks.”

The Bad News

Let’s get the bad news over with, you’re likely going to see a dip in Likes. I hate to break it to yah! But, if your page is of high quality and you didn’t un-justly pay for followers or convince all of your mom’s friends to Like your company page, then this probably isn’t going to kill your Like count. Neither I nor Facebook can tell you how drastically your number of Likes will decline, as this will vary from account to account. I’d be willing to bet that it won’t be insanely significant, but TechCrunch explained how the impact will likely effect marketers: “It’s all relative to how many Likes you have to begin with. If your page only has a few dozen likes, you might not even lose one; if it has a few million, that slight dip will feel a bit bigger.”

The Good News

This change is going to improve your tracking, results, and probably the interactions on your page. The two main improvements for marketers include:

• More accurate lookalike audiences: Lookalike audiences, which can be created through Facebook’s Customer Audience’s tool, allow marketers to target a similar audience to those that already follows their page. Of course, getting rid of inactive users will allow for a much more accurate representation of what their audience actually looks like.
• More accurate data: When evaluating performance and reviewing what your audience looks like that data will now be far more accurate, which Facebook explains as one of the main reasons for the change. “We already filter out likes and comments generated by deactivated or memorialized accounts from individual Page posts, so this update keeps data consistent,” says Facebook.

What Should You Do?

Well, don’t panic first off. This change could impact you slightly, but if the impact is significant all that means is that your likes were not legitimate and the people previously “following” your page were not actually following your page because they haven’t actually been using Facebook.

If you’re an employee who reports on Like growth to a higher up, you probably want to inform them of this change so they know it’s not tied to your efforts and this growth metric shouldn’t be evaluated as heavily.

Good luck with the Like massacre, and please comment below and let me know your thoughts on the change.