Expect Your Facebook Page’s Like Count to Drop Soon

Are you in charge of your company’s Facebook Page? By now, you may have noticed a slight dip in the number of your Page’s total likes. But if not, you might want to call the attention of your boss and prepare him or her for a possible decline in your like count.

Facebook has announced that it’s making Page likes “more meaningful” by scrubbing like counts from accounts that are inactive. Inactive accounts include those that have been manually deactivated by users, as well as those that have been memorialized due to their owner’s passing.

From the official announcement on the Facebook for Business blog, dated March 5, 2015:

Businesses use Page audience data to understand what their followers care about. 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.

The social media giant is acknowledging the update as a benefit to businesses that own Facebook Pages. By removing inactive accounts from the total Page likes, businesses can have a more accurate understanding of the actual number of people actively following and engaging with their social media content.

Facebook also explained that with this change, businesses can easily find more people interested in their content through tools such as lookalike audiences. The said tool enables businesses to reach new prospects by identifying apparent similarities between their profiles and those of the Pages’ existing fans. Furthermore, the change will ensure data consistency as Facebook has previously begun filtering out likes and comments generated by inactive accounts from individual Page posts, thus extending the same procedure to Page’s likes.

It’s important to note, however, that once a deactivated user decides to reactivate his or her Facebook account, the account will be re-added to a Page’s like count. Facebook said the change will take effect “over the coming weeks”. The social network advised Page admins to not be overly concerned about the dip in count, as the removed likes come from people who are no longer using the platform.

“Everyone benefits from meaningful information on Facebook,” stated the announcement. “It’s our hope that this update makes Pages even more valuable for businesses.”

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