Facebook Removing Inactive Likes – How Does This Affect My Business Page?

On March 5th, Facebook announced in an article titled “Making Page Likes More Meaningful,” that they would be “updating the way Page likes are counted by removing memorialized and voluntarily deactivated accounts from Pages’ like counts.” They continued to say that Page admins may see a slight dip in numbers in the coming weeks as this update rolled out. So, what does this really mean and how will it affect the numbers and engagement on your Facebook business page?

Facebook is continually trying to improve interaction and engagement between Pages and their followers, and give Page admins meaningful and relevant audience data to make better business decisions. By removing these accounts from a Page’s count they are removing people who were already inactive on Facebook, and thus skewed the Page’s numbers.

You may have seen a post asking followers to like or share in order to stay “active” on that page. This is a misinterpretation of the recent Facebook announcement and, as snopes.com explains,

“The announcement bore some resemblance to a long-circulating Facebook hoax claiming that the social network planned to delete inactive users from a page unless they liked or shared a post. Facebook defined inactive accounts as those of people who have died or permanently deactivated their Timelines, not folks who only log in rarely or infrequently.”

So the question still remains of how much of a “dip” should you expect? The update actually happened on March 11th, so you may not have even noticed a difference. If you haven’t already done so, take a look at your numbers and see. Unless you are a celebrity or big brand with a million or more followers, a small percentage dip probably didn’t affect you much. On the other hand, if you are Rihanna, you lost 7,986,973 (9.8% of likes). And if you are YouTube, you lost 5,796,122 (7.2% of likes).

Look at it this way, the followers that remain on your page you can count on to be real live interested people with a better chance of interacting with your page and product.