Your Facebook business page is about to lose Likes

If you have a Facebook business page you are about to lose Likes. Don’t panic, it isn’t what you think. Facebook are about to remove inactive accounts. This will be accounts that have been deactivated or accounts that haven’t been inactive for a lengthy period of time.

Facebook warns that this change will affect the number of page likes to your business page.

“The change ensures that data on Facebook is consistent and up-to-date”

This change will be happening “over the coming weeks”.

Decline in Likes

Obviously you are going to see a drop in Likes but if your page is high quality and you didn’t pay for followers then the affects to your Likes will probably be minor. For the majority of you, you are only likely to lose a few Likes if any, so it isn’t anything to worry about.

Why this is a good move by Facebook?

This isn’t actually a bad thing, although your Likes may drop, the change will help you to improve your tracking, results and interaction as it will weed out the spammy accounts that have no use for your business.

Here are the two main reasons that this will improve your Facebook marketing:

• More truthful audience – by getting rid of all the inactive users who have Liked your page, it will give you a more accurate representation of what your audience actually looks like. Those inactive accounts are out of your reach as they will never see your content but as you don’t know they are inactive you still believe you have this reach. With this change you will be able to see who you can actually reach.

• More accurate data – This change will help give more accurate results when evaluating performance. Facebook has said this is one of the main reasons for this change stating “We already filter out likes and comments generated by deactivated or memorialized accounts from individual Page posts, so this update keeps data consistent”.

What should you expect?

This change is likely to only have a small impact on you but if you lose a substantial amount of your Likes that just means your Likes weren’t legitimate and that those people weren’t actually following your page anyway.