Why Your Facebook Page’s Like Total Will Probably Fall

Facebook is removing likes from inactive and memorialized accounts from Pages' counts .

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It’s nothing personal, but you’re probably going to notice a drop in likes on your Facebook Page in the next several weeks. Facebook announced today that it will stop including likes from memorialized and voluntarily deactivated accounts in Pages’ like totals.

The move, Facebook said in a blog post, will ensure businesses have more precise information about the people who actively follow their Page and make ads targeted to people like their followers — aka lookalike audiences — more efficient.

From the blog post:

Over the coming weeks, Page admins should expect to see a small dip in their number of Page likes as a result of this update. It’s important to remember, though, that these removed likes represent people who were already inactive on Facebook.

Facebook said the dip in likes is likely to be small. That means it’s not likely to cause an uproar like the fake account purge Instagram undertook in December.

Facebook is signaling the change to Page administrators in a message within Insights:

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Martin Beck
Contributor
Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.

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